June II 2008

Fredric Morris
Editor-In-Chief
Connect-World

Bandwidth, Bandersnatches and breaking the ‘Net’

‘…and shun the frumious Bandersnatch’… Jabberwocky, by Lewis Carroll,

If I had only one word to characterize the NXTComm show last week in Las Vegas it would be ‘bandwidth’. Every year there is a different word, which by the following year is muted by the noise surrounding the next big word or disparaged - as in the case of IMS - when the promised miracles did not materialize as quickly as promised. This year bandwidth - more, faster, safer, cheaper and all in a smaller box - was the buzzword of choice.

There is good reason for bandwidth frisson - the brief shudder of excitement; bandwidth usage is growing dramatically with no end in sight. The NXTComm Daily News for day one - in an exceptionally well-done article about R&D, far above the normal standard for a show news sheet - included a disturbing graph from Cisco, called Growing Monthly IP Traffic. By 2011, in only three years, the graph shows overall bandwidth usage almost tripling - mostly driven by consumer usage. Today, consumer and business IP traffic are about equal, but in three years consumer demand for video (IPTV and cable TV) alone, excluding consumer Internet use for all other purposes, will exceed overall usage by businesses.

The more I looked at the graph, the more I began to wonder if it could be correct. If consumers will drive most of the bandwidth growth, who will pay to build out the network to meet the demand? Overall, the numbers I have seen show growing bandwidth usage, but little growth in overall revenue -certainly not enough extra revenue to multiply network capacity by three or more in the next three years. Now, consumer budgets are relatively inflexible - to spend more on communications services they have to spend less on something else. So, given rising prices for gasoline, food and probably almost everything else, where will the money come from? The carriers are facing a monster, a frumious bandwidth eating Bandersnatch of sorts, but have no ‘Vorpal blade’ to slay it.

If I were a serious industry analyst, I would have spent days researching this question - digging into the numbers and the trends, but since this eLetter is simply a stream of consciousness effort, my spontaneous musings on-line, I might easily be missing some important factors that change the whole earnings / broadband equation dramatically. Nevertheless, I did ask a number of people at NXTComm if they thought traffic growth would meet the graphed projections and where the cash needed to build the network would come from.

The results of my informal survey were confusing. No one seems to doubt the consumer can pay more, but no one seems to have noticed that salaries aren’t rising much. Almost everyone questioned believed the growth numbers, but many of the same people believed in a capacity crunch, some of these even thought the growth projections were too low. No one could give me a convincing answer (when they had any answer at all) as to where new cash or additional capacity would come from. The most plausible explanation - pieced together based upon the opinions of a number of highly placed sector executives - was that the bigger companies are already growing their networks using low-cost long-term financing they put in place some time ago. Newcomers, however, will have difficulty obtaining financing at a reasonable cost and might well lose ground.

I went to Cisco, the graph’s source, for some answers and spoke with Jeff Spagnola, their Vice President for Worldwide Service Provider Marketing. He gave me some interesting insights and a very recent Cisco white paper, Approaching the Zettabyte Era. The paper makes the astounding prediction that IP traffic, “will exceed half a zettabyte in four years”. A zettabyte is one sextillion bytes (8 bits).

Remember when megabytes and gigabytes sounded big? Well gigabytes are just the beginning; there is still a long way to go. You need to pass first by ‘tera’, ‘peta’ and ‘exa’ - trillion, quadrillion and quintillion - to get to ‘zetta’.

The paper is fascinating; all 23 well-researched pages are filled with facts and astounding/ominous predictions of stupendous growth. The first two pages alone state:

• Annual global IP traffic will exceed half a zettabyte in four years;
• Global IP traffic will nearly double every two years through 2012;
• The Internet in 2012 will be 75 times larger than it was in 2002 (28 exabytes/month equal to seven billion DVDs);
• Total IP traffic grew 55 per cent in 2007 and should grow 63 per cent in 2008;
• Internet video is now approximately one-quarter of all consumer Internet traffic;
• Together, all forms of video (TV, VoD, Internet and P2P) will account for almost 90 per cent of consumer traffic by 2012; and
• In 2002, Internet video will be nearly 400 times the U.S. Internet backbone in 2000 and it would take over half a million years to watch the videos crossing the network each month (I can hardly wait)

There are many more fascinating (stupefying) predictions, facts, trend analyses and explanations in the paper; much more than I can deal with in this letter, so I expect to return to this in the future. Nevertheless, despite the wealth of information, the report does not get into the economic implications and does little to answer the question of how such incredible consumer-driven growth rates can be sustained by inflation-flattened consumers. With little revenue growth, a lot of competition, pressure to build the bottom line, a flat-lining economy and little hope that disposable income will grow it seems only a matter of time before network growth slows.

I might be wrong; it has happened before, and I am especially leery when doubting Cisco’s predictions. I have a pen on my desk - a year-old memento celebrating the thousandth CSR-1 92-terabit super router and a reminder of my failure to understand the need for such capacity. Two years ago I would have guessed that it would take at least five years to reach that mark. They have already sold two thousand and can’t keep up with the demand.

I discussed the white paper with Kelly Ahuja, the Vice President and General Manager of Cisco’s Carrier Routing Business Unit, the unit responsible for the CSR-1. He believes, despite my contention that today’s consumer might not have the cash to pay for much more and that some of the paper’s predictions might even be conservative. Well, given my track record and his, the odds are in his favour; still…

Where is all the capacity to come from? Speaking with executives from a wide variety of companies at NXTComm, I was amazed at the lack of concern regarding Internet capacity and Internet addresses. When asked about the challenges and problems they will have to face during the next few years, not one mentioned the growing probability of a severe Internet capacity crunch or that Internet addresses will soon run out and there is no Y2K-type effort to switch to IPv6 (Internet Protocol Version 6). IPv6 replaces the current version, IPv4 and resolves a number of version 4’s problems especially the growing shortage of IPv4 addresses. I had spoken about this with a number of people, but none had much to say about the prospect of an Internet meltdown.

Oddly enough, despite the apparent lack of concern, on the last day the NXTComm Daily News reported the results of a survey taken during the show by Tellabs and IDC that 51 per cent felt the Internet would ‘break’ (whatever that means) in less than two years. Show goers suggested everything from network neutrality, to usage limits, traffic priorities, deep-packet inspection to determine content types and priorities, and bandwidth metering to charge heavy users as ways to control usage and pay for the additional capacity.

Grant Seiffert, President of the Telecommunications Industry Association, the TIA, was the only one at the show to speak of the IPv6 issue. The TIA aims to become the sector’s ‘thought leader’ for a number of vital issues such as IPv6, green telecommunications (they have an extensive ‘green’ database to help industries monitor compliance), expanded cell phone handset serial numbering, telematics for autos, and ICTs for healthcare. Although most companies claim to support the IPv6 initiative and/or have compliant products, the responses were so tepid they were hard to believe. Judging by the almost total lack of IPv6 enthusiasm at the show, I can only wish the TIA good luck and success (soon, very soon) with their efforts.

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Our next Connect-World India Issue will be published early next month. This edition of Connect-World will be widely distributed to our reader base and, as well, at shows where we are one of the main media sponsors such as: India Telecom, New Delhi (11-13 December) and Convergence India, New Delhi (19-21 March 2009).

The theme for this issue will be: Seamless networks and seamless business in a seamless world.

Technologically, if not politically, the world is becoming increasingly interconnected, interdependent and interoperable. Few if any big companies are ‘national’ in the old sense; they no longer exist, work buy supplies and services and sell within the boundaries of a single nation. Supply chains and processes of all sorts reach into other nations and at times circle the globe crossing and interacting with one another, first in one nation than another, in subtle and complex ways.

Nowhere is this more obvious than in India, where broadband connectivity has, seemingly overnight, reinvented the country’s economy and re-written its future. More than just outsourcing, taking over existing processes in behalf of companies in other parts of the world, India is increasingly sourcing its own processes, its own technologies and products.

The speed and seamless interconnection and interoperability of the world’s networks, both wired and wireless, using a wide variety of transmission media and technologies, is now so common it is rarely noticed by the user, but much of India’s growth depends upon just this. This effortless connectivity makes possible the seamless interoperability of business processes and supply chains spread throughout the world. Today’s technology is inventing a seamless, global, work environment that might, one day, lead to a seamless world.

This issue of Connect-World India will explore the influence of information and communication technology upon the transformation of India, and how India is itself transforming the technology and processes and helping create a seamless world.

India 2008 Media Pack; Click here

June I 2008

Fredric Morris
Editor-In-Chief
Connect-World

Nobel Prize; sell-out merge, submerge, change or bust; place your bets

Of all the many new ICT technology and trends making their mark on how we live and work, my vote for that with the greatest impact throughout the world is wireless broadband. Not only does it keep us constantly connected to the Internet, the office, television, games and a long list of other ‘necessities’ of modern life in the developed world, it is also the emerging economies’ best hope for real affordable connectivity.

The Nobel committee does not give prizes to technologies, especially not to technologies that owe so much to the contributions of so many people over many decades. Still, there are a number of technologies that deserve such a prize for profoundly influencing the economy and bettering people’s lives. Technology - from reading and writing (yes, this is a technology), mechanical inventions starting with the wheel and the lever, transportation including horse-drawn vehicles, railroads, cars, and airplanes, energy sources such as petroleum, electricity and atomic, industrial advances such as mass-production and, surely, the computer - has shaped the world we live in and added immeasurably to the lives we lead.

One of the technologies I would definitely award a Nobel to is wireless telecommunications. Mobile or fixed, it is hard to think of anything - except perhaps rising oil prices - that has done so much recently to change the economy in many parts of the world.

I was in Munich last month, at the WiMAX World EMEA 2008 event, thinking, hearing and breathing wireless for several days and there is nothing like an overdose of business models, technology and regulatory affairs to turn my thoughts away from nuts and bolts to human questions - hence my musings on the Nobel Prize.

The event brought together some 1500 attendees and 120 sponsors. The conference - and the exceptional pre-conference event - was as good a round up of the advantages, disadvantages, deployment strategies, business models and business cases as I have ever seen.

I have been following WiMAX - along with every other technology in the ICT sector - but I have not been living and breathing WiMAX technology, ecosystem, markets, regulations, networks, planning, security, applications, business models, equipment and such. There is a long list of these ‘little details’ that I have not been able to keep up with, but the WiMAX World event was a great reminder of how complex the rollout of a new technology can be. The conference gave an unusually comprehensive update of the sector.

It is easy to forget just how complicated the rollout of a radio network really is - even if you have been through a rollout and survived; time blurs details. WiMAX was, supposedly, the easy low cost way for start-ups to leap ahead. Maybe easier and lower-cost, but easy - no way!

Then too, there are so many news reports about mobile WiMAX in the USA and EU - and so few about many other parts of the world - that I was surprised by the strong interest in fixed 3.5 GHz WiMAX in Eastern Europe.

Of course, I shouldn’t have been surprised considering the characteristics of the telecommunications market in the lesser developed parts of the EMEA region. Nevertheless, despite thinking, reading and writing about developing regions for years, I unthinkingly fell into picturing the rest of the world’s needs as being the same as those in highly developed regions. Well, this woke me up.

The differences are in the details, but there are so many details that just running through my notes and listing these ‘differences’ was a surprisingly long process. Suitable technology, regulatory frameworks, spectrum decisions, backhaul considerations, market plans, business models, network architecture, the need for mobility, QoS, and equipment availability - among many other characteristics - all look different depending upon where in the world you are standing.

In regions of the world where 3G dominates mobile broadband, the big concern is how to protect the 3G investment and evolve to compete with the WiMAX threat. All the talk in the USA centres upon the threats of wireless broadband - not only WiMAX versus LTE, but of any sort of wireless against everything including cable and DSL. This is much different from the developing world, where wireless is the flavour of choice - it is, generally speaking, much cheaper to rollout than wireline.

Since developing regions desperately need communications, the world’s major wireless companies have been targeting the fast-growing emerging markets. The growth of the emerging economy market has been one of the real success stories in recent years. Mobile growth in these communications hungry regions, powered by prepaid cards and ultra-low-cost handsets has been phenomenal. Fixed wireless technologies, especially WiMAX, offer developing regions a way to expand their telecom infrastructures and services, including broadband Internet access, without breaking the bank.

The major operators from developed economies have long realised they would need new markets when their home markets approached saturation. The need to acquire new customers wherever they can be found, the changes in market dynamics as competition forces prices for services and equipment to commodity levels and the convergence of networks, technologies and services have changed the essential nature of the sector.

Market forces everywhere are pushing prices and margins downward, so economies of scale and scope - be they for equipment, services, applications or content are essential. These forces - together with the offering of services crossing over between the mobile, wireless, wireline, cable and broadcasting sectors - are driving the consolidation of the world’s telecommunications market. Smaller players have always had to work harder to survive and they will have to work even harder in the future. Many will not be able to keep up the pace; they have to sell-out, merge, submerge, change or bust. The pressure on small players is growing daily.

Some companies are targeting the emerging markets to compensate for changing home markets, other operators, such as Verizon and AT&T in the USA, are pushing fibre delivered services into the cable companies’ markets. Cable operators’ business models, from the biggest on down, are up in the air - looking for ways to get into the wireless market, both fixed and mobile and broadband, to meet the growing competition from phone companies. Cable companies Comcast, Time Warner Cable and Bright House Networks, if you remember my recent eLetter, joined Sprint, Clearwire and Google in a US$3.2 billion consortium to build a WiMAX powerhouse. For much the same reasons, Cablevision is building out a WiFi network wherever its cable network reaches to offer broadband to subscribers on the move. The clear lines that traditionally separated mobile operators, fixed operators, cable companies and even ISPs are disappearing at a quickening pace.

To add a bit more spice to the brew, the White Space Coalition, which includes Google, Dell, HP, Intel, Microsoft, and Philips, among others, have been applying to use ‘white spaces’ frequencies. White spaces are unused frequencies, mainly between channels, in the frequencies assigned to TV broadcasting; the coalition wants to use these unused television airwaves to offer high-speed Internet streams. Now, when Microsoft and Google work together you know there is some really serious interest in upsetting established models.

Broadcasters, predictably, are fighting this attempt to break into their territory, but if the Coalition can prove they can use the white space frequencies without creating harmful interference the broadcasters are likely to lose. I’ll bet the Coalition will win this battle. I will also bet that we are heading for one hell of a knockdown brawl in the wireless market. I won’t bet on who will win.

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Our next Connect-World India Issue will be published early next month. This edition of Connect-World will be widely distributed to our reader base and, as well, at shows where we are one of the main media sponsors such as: India Telecom, New Delhi (11-13 December) and Convergence India, New Delhi (19-21 March 2009).

The theme for this issue will be: Seamless networks and seamless business in a seamless world.

Technologically, if not politically, the world is becoming increasingly interconnected, interdependent and interoperable. Few if any big companies are ‘national’ in the old sense; they no longer exist, work buy supplies and services and sell within the boundaries of a single nation. Supply chains and processes of all sorts reach into other nations and at times circle the globe crossing and interacting with one another, first in one nation than another, in subtle and complex ways.

Nowhere is this more obvious than in India, where broadband connectivity has, seemingly overnight, reinvented the country’s economy and re-written its future. More than just outsourcing, taking over existing processes in behalf of companies in other parts of the world, India is increasingly sourcing its own processes, its own technologies and products.

The speed and seamless interconnection and interoperability of the world’s networks, both wired and wireless, using a wide variety of transmission media and technologies, is now so common it is rarely noticed by the user, but much of India’s growth depends upon just this. This effortless connectivity makes possible the seamless interoperability of business processes and supply chains spread throughout the world. Today’s technology is inventing a seamless, global, work environment that might, one day, lead to a seamless world.

This issue of Connect-World India will explore the influence of information and communication technology upon the transformation of India, and how India is itself transforming the technology and processes and helping create a seamless world.

India 2008 Media Pack; Click here

May III 2008

Fredric Morris
Editor-In-Chief
Connect-World

Africa - growing up, hard answers to hard problems

Africa is the birthplace of humanity, but in too many ways it is an infant that never grew up. There are many reasons for this, many sad reasons, historical reasons, geographical and ecological reasons, diseases, disorganisation, colonisation and a long list of accidental occurrences that have impeded Africa’s development. Much of Africa’s history has worked against its development. Today, there is a ray of hope, if we can only catch it.

It has been often said, so often it is almost a cliché, that information and communications technology (ICT) can be the catalyst that puts the continent on the path of meaningful development. The continent has made important strides in recent years; many regions have made great progress, but in others far too little has been accomplished. Serious health problems abound, the economic infrastructure of much of the continent is weak, practically inexistent in some parts, governments grope in the dark to deal with massive problems, food production in some regions is so precarious that fights break out over land and tribal rivalries, driven by despair, become genocidal wars.

In contrast with China, India and South Asia where the World Bank reports a dramatically decreasing incidence of extreme poverty (survival on less than US$1 per day), extreme poverty is growing in Sub-Saharan Africa. Obviously, ICTs cannot transform the world for these people overnight, but its use can help improve agricultural development, support health programmes that fight disease, improve the efficiency of governments, shore up small businesses, greatly improve access to top-grade education and information and put the continent on the path towards economic growth through effective integration with the global economy.

Earlier this month (May 12-15) in Cairo, Egypt, the International Telecommunications Union, the ITU, held its ITU Telecom Africa 2008 event. The ITU, the arm of the United Nations dedicated to ICT, organised the World Summit on the Information Society (WSIS) and is responsible for the ITU Telecom series of regional and global conferences and exhibitions. According to the ITU’s Secretary-General, Dr Hamadoun Touré, “…there needs to be an organisation that safeguards everyone’s fundamental right to communicate. ITU is that organisation.”

President Hosni Mubarak of Egypt inaugurated TELECOM AFRICA 2008, a forum for high-level debate among regional leaders of government and industry and a “…networking platform for both governments and the private sector to chart the future course of the ICT industry”. According to Dr Tarek Kamel, Minister of Communications and Information Technology of Egypt, “It is our obligation to pave the way for African citizens who are not yet online, investigate what the barriers are, work on overcoming them and make sure to maximize Africa’s share of the next billion users of the cyber world.” He added, “It is our obligation to encourage and attract further investments from Africa and from the rest of the world to make use of the growing market opportunities.”

ITU Telecom Africa 2008, fittingly, was dedicated to promoting ICTs as drivers of African development. As usual at ITU events, the ITU Forum conference programme and the ITU’s Youth Forum were the highlights of the event.

At the ITU Telecom Africa opening ceremony, Dr Ahmed Nazif, Egypt’s Prime Minister and former Minister of Communications and Information Technology - as well as a past Connect-World contributor - pointed to the impact of ICTs upon his country’s economy. “ICT went from competing for government resources to being a net contributor to the economy… In Egypt, we have seen the GDP grow by over seven per cent in recent years with double digit growth in ICT…” He also stated that the ICT sector is capable of delivering a competitive edge, “but it can only be achieved with the right infrastructure and a qualified workforce”.

Dr Nazif was right of course, especially when he said, “but it can only be achieved with the right infrastructure and a qualified workforce”.

The problems in Africa, as many speakers pointed out, call for two things in short supply - infrastructure and a qualified workforce.

Africa’s mobile sector has the world’s highest annual growth rate in mobile subscribers. More than 65 million new subscribers were added to the lists during 2007; there are now over a quarter of a billion mobile subscribers in Africa - about a third of the continent’s population. Mobile subscribers, although more evenly distributed than just a few years ago, are still highly concentrated in North African countries, in South Africa and scattered urban centres. Internet access, on the other hand, has been highly concentrated; more than half of the region’s Internet users are in North African countries and South Africa. Only one person in twenty, five per cent of the population, were online by the end of 2007. In Sub-Saharan Africa, penetration averages just three per cent. The shortage of international bandwidth drives the price for Internet connectivity to an average of US$ 50 per month - unaffordable in regions where per capita income hovers around US$70.

Despite the spotty coverage and limited Internet usage, the economic and practical impact of voice access has been staggering and the impact of such innovative uses for cell phones as mobile fund transfers for micro-payments in a region where credit cards and banking are out of the question for the average citizen, can be truly revolutionary.

Nevertheless, without better infrastructure of all types, the potential for ICTs to transform the economy is limited. A qualified workforce, in regions where even literacy is in short supply, is even harder to create. Assuming we can make the Internet available, just how much can an illiterate worker benefit? Since the vast majority of workers in the micro enterprises that dominate local economies are likely to be at least functionally illiterate, they will be forever cut off from much of the advantages that ICTs can bring. Unfortunately, once again this problem was largely ignored by the ITU (as it was at the WSIS) and the ICT sector. I have long felt that our use of ICTs to help the disadvantaged population of the world needs serious rethinking - systems that rely almost exclusively upon the written word are of little use to the largely illiterate people in developing regions that need all the help they can get. Yes, we need digital inclusion programmes for schools and communities, but why can’t we develop programmes to bring more of the benefits of ICTs to micro enterprises than just plain voice? If we are looking for economic impact, that is a great place to start.

The ITU Telecom Youth Forum is another great place to start. There were some 75 or 80 (much too active for me to count) young men and women from about 40 African countries in this six-day programme of discussions with government, industry and other leaders from around the world. The Youth Forum focuses, broadly speaking, upon the use of ICTs for regional development and provides an opportunity for these future leaders to, “… develop and deliver their… vision and action plan for their region, or the world”. These university students were selected based upon their essays proposing ways, “to facilitate the uptake and use of ICTs by young people for socio-economic development”, and their ideas regarding, “how ICTs can contribute to peace and stability within the African continent”. These very bright, enthusiastic and engaged young people are Africa’s greatest resource, but many with the same potential haven’t had, will never have, the same opportunity for an education or much of a chance to do more than survive.

The ITU Telecom Africa 2008 event brought together 191 Exhibitors from 37 countries, 308 Ministers, Regulators and Director Generals, and Company CEOs from 92 countries, 747 Forum and Youth Forum participants including speakers, within an overall total of 6706 participants.
The event showed a growing awareness of the power of ICTs to drive the continent forward. It was encouraging to see so many dedicated bright people - true leaders, from the continent and around the world - seeking ways to foster Africa’s development , ways to help Africa grow up to take its place in a world increasingly shaped by ICTs. On the other hand, statistics from international institutions and independent research groups point to a serious lack of progress on many fronts and a situation that is worsening for many.

There were many good proposals, by many good and dedicated people, outlining ways ICTs can be used to help the continent. Sadly, most of these ideas are just more of the same solutions we have seen over the years; they are undoubtedly good and useful, but - also undoubtedly - far from enough. The easy answers work, but do relatively little to help the small businesses that are the backbone of local economies in much of the continent. Compared to what ICTs can do, the easy answers do little. Better, admittedly more difficult, answers to the needs of these businesses exist and can be found if the ICT sector, universities, governments and international institutions join forces to discover what these small survival-oriented businesses truly need and then work together to provide it. We need hard answers to hard problems.

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Our next Connect-World North America Issue will be published later this month. This edition of Connect-World will be widely distributed to our reader base and, as well, at shows where we are one of the main media sponsors such as: • ISCe International Satellite & Communications Conference, San Diego, USA, June 10–12, 2008 and • Nxt Com, Las Vegas, USA, June 17-19, 2008

The theme for this issue will be, 3G, 4 G or both? The race is on.

In a normal world 2.5G follows 2G and is followed by 3 or 3.x G and then 4G, Operators normally would follow a pre-defined evolutionary sequence, but the competition is so rough – and the economics so compelling – that many companies are considering jumping the track and switching technologies and generations. What might the consequences of this be in terms of the networks, equipment, applications, security and especially the market and the consumer?

North America 2008 Media Pack; Click here

May II 2008

Fredric Morris
Editor-In-Chief
Connect-World

4 G and 3 cheers for Intel… WiFiWiMAX! WiFiWiMAX! Go Team Go!

Intel is one of those big companies that some people almost love to hate - but hate to admit it. Some people just love to cheer for the underdog and when they really have little reason - the underdog is a dog or just doesn’t make the grade - they feel uneasy, they secretly begrudge their admiration. I have my root-for-the-underdog days, but all-in-all I think Intel rocks. (Disclosure - they are not Connect-World advertisers, but I do have a cloth bag that has Intel printed on it. They handed them out at a show several years ago and it now follows me to shows around the world; I stuff my laundry in it - it has a drawstring. Draw your own conclusions.)

I won’t speak about all they have done for personal computing; we all know what a big part they are of what made, and makes, personal computing possible. What fewer people realize is their role in making WiFi the success it is and of the importance of Intel’s backing of WiMAX. In my laundrily biased opinion, Intel’s Centrino chip made WiFi happen by building it into everyone’s laptop. This not only raised the bar for all chipmakers, but made anywhere anytime connectivity a must. Remember the first time you connected to a WiFi network at an airport or a coffee shop? How many of you felt the very first time - as I did - that, ‘that’s the way it should be’, I should be able to connect anywhere.

I’m sitting in an airport now, logged into the WiFi network, on my way to the ITU Telecom Africa 2008 event and from there to the WiMAX World event in Munich. I just checked the news and saw that Intel won a 15 year license in Sweden for a national wireless broadband network using WiMAX technology. It bid US$ 26 million for the frequencies, which it reportedly plans to lease to local partners.

This isn’t the first time that Intel pushed its WiMAX vision by buying into the user-side of the equation; earlier this same week Intel put up US $1billion to restart the Sprint / Clearwire marriage dedicated to WiFi access - it went sour last year after only a few months. To re-start the effort and re-focus its energy on WiMAX, Big Daddy Intel, which had already invested a reported US$620 million in Clearwire, put up the extra billion as part of a US$ 3.2 billion consortium with Sprint, Clearwire, Comcast, Google, Time Warner Cable, and Bright House Networks. The result is a merger of the Clearwire and Sprint WiMAX carriers into a single entity worth some US $14.5 billion.

There are many in the industry that feel Sprint has no truly viable 4G strategy at this point other than WiMAX; so without the consortium it would be hard-pressed to rollout a competitive network. It wasn’t Intel’s altruism, though that saved the day for Sprint, Intel was just backing its favourite horse - WiMAX. Nevertheless, it was a marriage made in heaven. Sprint needs a strong response to LTE - the 4G broadband upgrade technology of choice for most GSM mobile carriers - and Intel has long been leading the push for WiMAX. Intel sponsors, indeed leads, the WiMAX forum, the industry association which guides the development and standardisation of this technology.

The Forum, operator and regulators have had their hands full trying to figure out how to regulate this rapidly evolving technology. WiMAX rapidly evolved from a line-of-sight high frequency fixed broadband technology, that at first was to use unlicensed spectrum, to a non-line-of-sight mobile/fixed broadband technology operating in a variety of lower frequencies that work indoors and in heavily built-up urban areas. LTE has its natural constituency, mainly the incumbent GSM operators that have paid fortunes for the rights to the frequencies they use. They, understandably, are not at all pleased that the frequencies that their competitors use are relatively cheap. They are also troubled by the push for technology neutral regulations which would let operators use licensed frequencies originally destined for other uses for WiMAX.

Given this background and Intel’s heavy investment in WiMAX enabled chips, it is clear that Intel needs friendly frontline troops from the industry to push its vision and guarantee a healthy return on investment.

It is going to be a big fight; the GSM Association is supporting LTE and is not particularly pleased by the prospect of competing with much cheaper phone calls and competition with suppliers of a wide range of broadband enabled services and applications.

In addition to its WiMAX chip sales, Intel gets a share of the revenues generated by the new venture. If WiMAX flies, Intel stands to gain fortunes from both sides of the equation. I have no idea of exactly how the showdown will play out, but I am fairly sure both LTE and WiMAX will survive and thrive. Given the need for all networks to interoperate, users of these two technologies will eventually develop mutually supportive mechanisms and settle into a sustainable equilibrium. There might well be operators that deploy both technologies for technological and marketing reasons - LTE in more highly populated regions and WiMAX for backhaul and local service in rural environments. I expect handsets that simultaneously handle both technologies - and WiFi as well - will probably reach the market shortly.

The new consortium has a tough battle ahead, but given the billions Intel is pouring into the segment - Intel has put money into at least 16 other WiMAX-related companies - WiMAX should be able to soldier on until what is an essentially unwinnable battle peters out. Intel has put its chips on the table, but by no means its entire hoard, and seems likely to win its gamble. LTE will do well given the vested interests of GSM operators, but so should WiMAX. It will be a win for WiMAX, a very big win, not only for Intel, but for many in the developing regions of the world where WiMAX brings the promise of truly inexpensive broadband and voice. WiMAX is potentially more exciting than WiFi; if it grows to realise its full potential, it will be because Intel pushed it. So let’s hear it for Intel - WiFiWiMAX! WiFiWiMAX! Go Team Go!

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Our next Connect-World North America Issue will be published later this month. This edition of Connect-World will be widely distributed to our reader base and, as well, at shows where we are one of the main media sponsors such as: • ISCe International Satellite & Communications Conference, San Diego, USA, June 10–12, 2008 and • Nxt Com, Las Vegas, USA, June 17-19, 2008

The theme for this issue will be, 3G, 4 G or both? The race is on.

In a normal world 2.5G follows 2G and is followed by 3 or 3.x G and then 4G, Operators normally would follow a pre-defined evolutionary sequence, but the competition is so rough – and the economics so compelling – that many companies are considering jumping the track and switching technologies and generations. What might the consequences of this be in terms of the networks, equipment, applications, security and especially the market and the consumer?

North America 2008 Media Pack; Click here

May I 2008

Fredric Morris
Editor-In-Chief
Connect-World

Good business in a digital world

Recently, I have read and thought quite a bit about how companies will have to rethink their business to survive in the age of ICTs and the global economy. I have also been closely following the dilemma of telecom service providers whose traditional voice-driven business models seem doomed to follow prehistoric creatures into the tar pits.

Telecos, the world over are looking for a magic business model they can mount and ride into a perpetually sunny, high ARPU, future. I’ve never heard of a telecom service provider - let’s just call them all telcos here, it’s simpler - that only wants to drift along providing commodity services. To provide more advanced, non-commodity, services and wrest business from an ever-wider range of competitors they have to invest in IP-based next generation networks (NGN).

There is a good business case made for NGNs. NGNs are high-tech competitive weapons. NGNs cost less to build, operate and maintain than traditional networks. NGNs can more easily meet demands for greater, far greater, bandwidth. Given their IP base, NGNs provide a far more flexible platform for innovation and make it much easier to implement and bring advanced new services to market. All of these claims are eminently correct. Nevertheless, I wonder if the advanced applications telcos speak of will prove to be more than short-term stopgaps.

When pushed, telcos speak confidently of the service/content/application future - and they do their best to believe it; when squeezed there is very little juice in their replies. Traditional revenues are slipping and many telcos will have a problem finding new revenue sources. Data is picking up some of the slack, but there are many reasons to believe that most data and content based services will eventually slide down the slope to commodity land. Telcos, both fixed and mobile, rarely, very rarely, control content or even applications. Most telcos provide little more than a transmission pipe and a billing structure for content and applications providers. In truth, most telcos, even the newest, still think like utility providers; few have a notion of what an audience is or what drives a business to consume.

Wireline has seen better days; it is stagnating or declining in some parts of the world. Broadband is holding back the losses and dreams of triple or even quad-play to stave off depression. But I cannot see content, even IPTV, in the role of saviour, there is too much content and too much competition. Too much of anything in a market can transmute golden products into low cost commodities.

Mobile is still growing. Everyone talks about mobile data’s rise; revenues are growing steadily, at least for now, but commodity drift with flat-rate deals is setting in. Sure, we are seeing more cable and Internet-type content and services, but few new or exciting made-for-mobile services - with the important exceptions of location-based services and mobile money.

Telcos, both wired and wireless, are fighting to hold and gain customers and build revenues. Most new services simply deliver someone else’s content; with few exceptions, there is little if any value added.

Telcos still make good money doing what they have always done best, fetching and carrying the words, content, whatever, of others - but they have few truly unique services, and few winning propositions of their own except transport. Mobile operators in much of the world are riding the wave; there are still large pools of potential subscribers to conquer so they are often blind to the danger of becoming tomorrow’s thin-margin commodity providers. They are in a bind, the technology that makes them, breaks them.

In a digitalised world, anyone can offer the same service. Anyone can mount a virtual network. Anyone can buy content. Anyone can compete on the playing field of their choice; pygmies can battle giants and Davids can slay Goliaths. In fact, any service can be commoditised. As independent filmmakers used to say, ‘all you need is an idea in your head and a camera in your hand’. Today, all you need is an idea in your head and a good broadband connection to the Net’.

Many years ago, I read - I have forgotten who said it - that there is nothing that someone cannot make more cheaply and worse and sell for less. The words are not exact, but the meaning is. At the time, it was true. Today, outsourcing - perhaps just ‘sourcing’ would be more accurate - has turned this proposition on its head. There is little that cannot be bought for less, but with better quality, somewhere in the world. This is less of an exaggeration than many might think.

The jam the telcos are in is not unique. Almost everyone, almost every company, can easily find itself in the same position. Digitalisation is the great commodity-maker; the Internet has levelled the market. No matter what the line of business, anyone, anywhere in the world can play the game - and one needn’t be big to do it. Anyone with an idea can outsource production and services - their entire supply chain, marketing, distribution and more, if need be - and go head-to-head with the giants in any niche they choose.

The telcos are invading everyone’s turf, and having their own invaded in turn. They have some natural advantages, certain core strengths, but they have never learned how to apply them imaginatively with constant creativity and updating of their offerings. It isn’t an easy task.

For individual clients, until someone comes up with a truly new idea, except for targeted advertising, telcos seem fated to be little more than commodity-pushers - the pipes and billers for services others own. Telcos will be perpetual percentage-taking middlemen, until someone discovers how to cut them out of the chain.

The telcos have done better with larger companies, providing them with sophisticated services that the companies find themselves too hard-pressed to handle themselves. Every telco is competing for the big clients; this lets clients drive hard bargains, so margin will tend to be low. By providing highly personalised increasingly complex services, by becoming so vital to and interwoven with their client’s daily routine, telcos can build margins and do well. Even so, they must watch the competition and constantly upgrade their services.

If I were a telco looking for a new market where I could really add value, build loyal customers and build revenues, I would go after the micro to mid-sized enterprise segment.

Smaller companies have fewer internal resources so, in addition to specialised communications services, they also need a wide variety of reasonably priced business services. Telcos, especially the larger ones, have the size and scale - not to mention the experience of running their own highly complex operations - to offer a wide portfolio of mix and match services to smaller companies, some telco cost-centres might well serve as the models for service providing profit-centres.

Anyone who has ever worked with both large and small companies knows that small companies have to deal with most of the same basic functions as large ones, but they have far fewer resources and far fewer specialists to handle each function; the smaller the company, the greater the number of functions each employee must assume. There is so much information and so many services on the Internet that smaller companies often finding it difficult to find, contract, monitor and administer the services they need. Telcos could offer smaller companies a portfolio of online ‘meta-management’ services - services that provide higher-level integration of other service providers’ offerings. If they charged on an affordable per transaction basis, they should be able to capture, keep and grow a great number of clients.

I don’t know if any such a service yet exists, but if I had a small company, I would be overjoyed to have meta-management systems of the sort big companies use to tie everything together into a coherent understandable whole. I would like a telco that tied all my internal information together with the information from all the external services I used and, perhaps, provided a few others I needed. An affordable system that synthesised the data received from all sources from accounting to supply chain to sales, and combined it with local market and economic data and offered alerts and practical guidance based on industry best practices might not be easy or cheap to develop, but it would offer long-term growth and revenues for users and telcos alike.

It sounds complicated and it is, but no more complicated than what many larger companies already have internally - and small companies could really use it.

Telcos have the scale to develop and operate meta-managers on a transaction basis. It is a good business opportunity. Unlike the individual consumer whose budget is relatively fixed, these systems can help companies grow; as they grow, their transactions, loyalty and revenue generating potential will grow apace. That’s good business!

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Our next Connect-World Europe Issue will be published later this month. This edition of Connect-World will be widely distributed to our reader base and, as well, at shows where we are one of the main media sponsors such as: Sviaz / Expo Comm (14-18 May, Moscow), FT Mobile Media Conference (15-16 May, London), Wimax World Europe (29-31 May, Vienna), and Von Europe (11-14 June, Stockholm).

The theme for this issue will be, The evolving ‘Net’ - Rising to the challenge of rising use.

When speaking of networks, conventional wisdom and traditional business models no longer work as they did. The lines are blurring in the fixed, mobile and even broadcasting markets. Wired networks now handle traffic once thought suitable only for wireless and wireless is substituting wired in a broad range of applications. Seamless handoffs between wired and wireless networks –and,  indeed, mergers, partnerships and consolidations bringing together networks and players of all sorts – further confuse the once prettily organised networking landscape.

This issue will examine what these changes in technologies and the market mean for the sector. How can the residential and business consumer best be served? What does the future hold for network operators of all types?

April II 2008

Fredric Morris
Editor-In-Chief
Connect-World

Content rules? Rules for ads, Big Brother and nerds

Content is king - or so they say. Still, notes here and there in the international press, blogs, newsletters and chats with friends make one wonder where content’s kingdom is - in the UK or Nepal. I would bet on Nepal.

I have long had doubts about the revenues most content can generate. The problem is not content; it is the willingness, the ability, of enough people to pay for it on a regular basis.

There is enough content produced to drown in, but much of it - look at YouTube - is free. It’s hard to compete with free; the price is right and it sets a mark that all other content competes with. Content costs money and consumers don’t like to pay.

There is a time-tested remedy for situations such as these - advertising. Advertisers are learning to love audiences they can target precisely - and that is what online service providers can offer.

To target ads, advertisers accumulate data about visits made to the sites of third-party advertising network members, and correlate consumers’ surfing habits with their personal product tastes and the likelihood that certain types of advertising will appeal to them. The same data, though, can also let advertisers draw conclusions about a wide range of personal behaviours that many consumers would not like others to know about - conclusions that can be embarrassing, erroneous, dead wrong, or even dangerous. Data gatherers are often guilty - intentionally or not - of outrageous invasion of privacy.

What are advertisers to do? What are the ethical ramifications? What do advertisers know about you that you wish they didn’t? What if this information is misused or falls into the wrong hands?

A press release last week from the NAI speaks to these issues. From a different point of view, these are some of the same issues I spoke of in my eLetter at the end of March - about some of the risks inherent in the growth of Internet access and the Information Society.

The NAI addresses the problem of dealing with the sensitive personal data that Web sites and advertising networks gather by tracking visitors to their sites.

The NAI, the Network Advertising Initiative, which counts Google’s DoubleClick, Yahoo’s BlueLithium, AOL’s Advertising.com and Tacoda among its members, is a “cooperative of online marketing and analytics companies committed to building consumer awareness and establishing responsible business and data management practices and standards”. They published a draft (open for public comment until June 12 - http://www.networkadvertising.org/networks/NAI_Principles_2008_Draft_for_Public.pdf) of a “Self-Regulatory Code of Conduct for Online Behavioral Advertising“. The draft is the NAI’s response to proposals made by the U.S. Federal Trade Commission’s last year.

The NAI’s aims to protect the consumer’s privacy, to control the abuse of OBA (Third-Party Online Behavioural Advertising), provide consumers with safeguards that inform them when OBA is being used, and allow them to opt out - to deny permission for its use.

Few people that are not involved in online marketing are aware of the systems in place for third-party online behavioural advertising. The systems come in a variety of flavours, but the principles are the same. Online advertisers often take part in advertising networks. The networks maintain databases of all the users that visit the sites of any of their members. They use cookies and other technologies that let them identify Web surfers that have visited any of the sites of a given network’s members.

Typically, when users visit the site of a member of a third-party marketing network they are automatically linked to a third-party ad server site. The ad server identifies the visiting computer and sends it a ‘cookie’ - a bit of text that is saved by the computer in a cookie file. The ad server then records the user’s access in its database. Every time a consumer accesses the site of one of the advertising network’s members, the ad server records the visit. In time, ad servers can collect a sizeable amount of data concerning the consumer’s habits, so whenever the ad server detects one of its own cookies in a visiting computer, it will check its files and send back banner adds most likely to be of interest to the consumer. The advertising network site currently visited by the consumer will then display the banner.

It all sounds very innocent and, in truth, most often is - advertisers can narrowly target their ads at the consumers most likely to be interested. On the other hand, when the information that is gathered goes beyond normal marketing needs it invades the consumer’s privacy. The NAI’s proposed guidelines sets forth an ethical framework for dealing with information gathered from members of, as they call them, ‘restricted’ and ‘sensitive’ consumer segments.

The NAI prohibits members from targeting online behavioural advertising to sensitive consumer segments and to children less than 13 years of age. “Restricted and Sensitive Consumer Segments” include, but are not limited to:
1. Certain medical/health conditions–
A. HIV/ AIDS status
B. Sexually-related conditions (e.g., sexually transmitted diseases, erectile dysfunction)
C. Psychiatric conditions
D. Cancer status
E. Abortion-related

2. Certain personal life information–
A. Sexual behaviour/orientation/identity (i.e., Lesbian/Gay/Bisexual/Transgender)
B. Criminal victim status (e.g., rape victim status)

There is another list of “potentially restricted” consumers. These are not automatically excluded, but NAI members are expected to evaluate this data within the context it will be used. This category includes - but, once again, is not limited to data regarding: age /birth date, addictions (e.g., drugs, alcohol, gambling), alien status or nationality, criminal history, death, disability, ethnic affiliation, marital status, philosophical beliefs, political affiliation or opinions, pregnancy, racial identification, religious affiliation or lack thereof and trade union membership.

This is an explosive list of personal characteristics, but it is far from exhaustive. It is great as far as it goes, but it only goes as far as a handful of NAI members - and I am certain there is a longer list of equally explosive characteristics that can be data mined that are not even covered.

Some of NAI’s members are gigantic; even so, they cover only a small percentage of the consumers on the Web. Then too, the rules depend upon a great deal of case-by-case judgement by the members and the temptation to interpret the rules leniently, loosely, is as great as the potential rewards for doing so. Some of these ‘sensitive’ markets - racial groups, sexual preference groups - are enormous and highly lucrative.

I suspect that, at best, the NAI rules will prevent only the crassest misuse of data - its greatest strength will come from the consumer ‘opt-out’ and the disclosure procedures to which members must adhere. I am certain that much of the online behavioural advertising will just skim the line between the ordinarily tasteless and downright bad taste - sanctimoniously defended by their rigid adherence to the most liberal possible interpretations of the rules.

The NAI rules are a step in the right direction, but without legally enforced adherence by all online behavioural advertisers to a comprehensive set of broadly debated rules, Big Brother is an ad agency nerd fondling a database.

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Our next Connect-World Europe Issue will be published later this month. This edition of Connect-World will be widely distributed to our reader base and, as well, at shows where we are one of the main media sponsors such as: Sviaz / Expo Comm (14-18 May, Moscow), FT Mobile Media Conference (15-16 May, London), Wimax World Europe (29-31 May, Vienna), and Von Europe (11-14 June, Stockholm).

The theme for this issue will be, The evolving ‘Net’ - Rising to the challenge of rising use.

When speaking of networks, conventional wisdom and traditional business models no longer work as they did. The lines are blurring in the fixed, mobile and even broadcasting markets. Wired networks now handle traffic once thought suitable only for wireless and wireless is substituting wired in a broad range of applications. Seamless handoffs between wired and wireless networks –and, indeed, mergers, partnerships and consolidations bringing together networks and players of all sorts – further confuse the once prettily organised networking landscape.

This issue will examine what these changes in technologies and the market mean for the sector. How can the residential and business consumer best be served? What does the future hold for network operators of all types?

Europe II 2008 Media Pack; Click here

April I 2008

Fredric Morris
Editor-In-Chief
Connect-World

WWW (World Wide Web) and WWA (World Wide Auction)

Going! Going! Growing! Growing! - Groan!

The Web is becoming an auction arena and I am not talking about eBay - it is the World Wide Auction. The rise of international collaboration, of outsourcing and insourcing has created a global auction for services and products. The global auction, let’s call it the WWA, is squeezing the slack and inefficiencies out of markets, raising the competitive ante, dropping costs and prices for services, pumping up economies that never had much of a chance before and forcing ever-larger scale dislocations in the developed economies of the world.

Digitally supercharged collaboration is the driver. The rise of search engines that lets one find services and products the world over, the rise of digital communications superhighways and low-cost almost cost-free data communications has given a boost to developing economies such as India.

The philosophy of digital collaboration is simple, work (collaborate) with whoever does the job best and most cheaply, wherever you find them. By collaborating with other companies throughout the world, new companies can jumpstart their operations without a long and costly start-up effort. Existing companies can outsource many of their needs to cut costs and remain competitive in the global market. You don’t need to be big to have a big infrastructure, just outsource - or insource - what you need from specialists. Want to look big to impress your clients? Just hire an out-sized, outsourced, shadow operation.

Companies looking for ways to reduce their costs need only search the Web to easily find a product they need or a service provider with an abundant supply of highly educated, low cost talent who can provide any sort of service - even if it requires a PhD. The secret - the magic sauce that really makes collaboration cook - is Google.

This has had a powerful levelling effect upon the global economy. Work once restricted to certain developed countries is now exported to wherever the service can be had with the best quality at the lowest price. Economists from Adam Smith and Ricardo to Marx all have noted and applauded the efficient workings of free markets (Marx, considered capitalist free markets to be the most efficient way to break down national and institutional barriers in preparation for the eventual victory of labour). One of the consequences of such markets is the flow of work and value towards the producer with the best cost-benefit ratio.

Given the speed with which the digital market place works, and the ruthlessly efficient functioning of market forces, many jobs are quickly shifting around the world and many other jobs are not created in their traditional homes. The juice or the fat is being squeezed out of markets throughout the world. We are seeing the development of an international Wal-Mart model for collaborative business arrangements. Prices are falling and jobs are shifting - often to developing regions of the world.

Historically, these shifts are hard on labour and jobs in the short-term, but the developing nations that cut into traditional markets soon become big customers of and, paradoxically, big creators of other sorts of jobs in the very same developed countries they took jobs from. The key to survival in these times is constant re-training, lifelong education, and a flexibility regarding career choices.

Working together - collaboration - is not what it used to be. Once, not so very long ago, it meant sitting down with a colleague in the same room and working together on the same project. Collaboration is now a worldwide, digitally assisted, phenomenon; it is old style working together raised to the n^th degree and ‘n’ is the number of nodes, collaborators, information sources - what have you - available on the Internet. Collaboration is big business, for some it is their only business, for others it provides a lifeline, a way to survive in the global economy.

Collaboration, digital collaboration, comes in many flavours. It may be some sort of internal collaboration software that lets people in your company, in a variety of locations, share documents and ideas in real time to coordinate their efforts, plan a project, build a new device or solve a problem that just occurred. More sophisticated versions of this sort of workflow software let engineers in the United States, Western Europe, Russia, China, and any number of other countries keep the work going 24 hours per day, they pass the tasks along; if the sun goes down at one office it is coming up in another. They design cars, airplanes and chips, do back office tasks and just about anything else you can imagine; it is a long list and the tasks higher-level and more sophisticated every day.

Connectivity - the Internet - is the main enabler, but managing the flow of work, goods, time, cash and going with the flow, is the key concept. Managing the flow, more than managing it - working through it - is collaboration; it is the future.

I thought of this while watching a TV report about the inauguration and operational meltdown of the new Heathrow terminal - T5. It got me thinking about the collaboration needed to make this and similar tremendously complex operations function.

The automated baggage handling systems - it will take a while, but they will get it right - reminded me of some of the stories I have read during the last few years about RFID, radio frequency identification tags, that many companies, Wal-Mart especially, expect will greatly simplify important parts of their supply chain management systems. Supply chaining is the über-logistics management, the über-collaboration, that gets goods from all over the world and distributes them at the lowest cost, with the smallest delays, the fewest errors and the lowest inventory levels possible. A smooth running supply-chain calls for vastly complicated collaboration between the buyers - retailers like Wal-Mart, Carrefour, Target, Zara, manufactures like Boeing, Honda, Dell, Nokia - their suppliers, transport companies, designers, engineers all moderated by a constant flow of information, feedback, from the market.

Some of this has been possible for several years, but as time goes by, as connectivity improves and the electronics and systems get better, collaboration gets exponentially better. The growth of collaboration is somewhat like the growth of a child; as its brain and nervous system develop, its muscles get stronger and its communications - language - matures its control over its life and its environment grow in leaps and bounds. And this child has been growing.

Collaboration is the guiding principle in both the widely reported outsourcing phenomenon and the less well known, but increasingly important, insourcing services.

Insourcing has several definitions. In one sense, it is the opposite of outsourcing - it involves transferring internal production, functions and processes to a specialised outside company that performs the same tasks - but within the contracting enterprise.

The first experience with insourcing I remember goes back to the early 1980s. Of course, I immediately - only a quarter of a century later while writing this - recognised it for the collaborative breakthrough it was and understood its significance. A client of mine, a rather large multinational, used to take care of my travel arrangements whenever I visited one of their installations; their internal travel department negotiated with the airlines, car rental companies, hotel chains and the like. One day, though, I went to the travel office and, instead of a company department, I found a rather well-known travel agency. The people working there were mostly the same ones I had always dealt with, but now they worked for the agency that had convinced my client they could spend less and get better service by insourcing - if, indeed, the term existed then - their department.

Insourcing and outsourcing are two sides of the same coin - it all depends upon which side of the deal you are on. Insourcers also use outsourcers - its part of the game.

Collaboration takes many other forms, even instant messaging is a form of collaboration. The open source software development community relies upon the collaboration of its widespread participants. Conferencing tools such as Live Meeting, the Internet itself, Wikipedia, BitTorrent and services based upon peer-to-peer networking in general, Facebook, YouTube and social networking are all, each in its own way, as much a part of the collaboration phenomenon as insourcing and outsourcing.

Whatever the form collaboration takes, it is shaping up into a real revolution. The Industrial revolution became the Information Revolution; it might be the next revolution will centre upon the changes that collaboration is bringing. The Digital Collaboration Revolution does not sound terribly exciting - sorry, it’s the best I can do at the moment. A self-respecting revolution needs a far better name than that; it will certainly get one someday soon.

Collaboration and the WWA (World Wide Auction) is on the move and growing - it will, like all past revolutions, displace much we hold dear. Businesses and job categories will rise and fall - the harness makers will give way to automotive workers of the new age - and cultures will merge and change. As with all major social revolutions, in the short and medium term the WWA will bring both progress and pain. Going! Going! Growing! Growing! - Groan!

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Our next Connect-World Europe Issue will be published later this month. This edition of Connect-World will be widely distributed to our reader base and, as well, at shows where we are one of the main media sponsors such as: Sviaz / Expo Comm (14-18 May, Moscow), FT Mobile Media Conference (15-16 May, London), Wimax World Europe (29-31 May, Vienna), and Von Europe (11-14 June, Stockholm).

The theme for this issue will be, The evolving ‘Net’ - Rising to the challenge of rising use.

When speaking of networks, conventional wisdom and traditional business models no longer work as they did. The lines are blurring in the fixed, mobile and even broadcasting markets. Wired networks now handle traffic once thought suitable only for wireless and wireless is substituting wired in a broad range of applications. Seamless handoffs between wired and wireless networks –and,  indeed, mergers, partnerships and consolidations bringing together networks and players of all sorts – further confuse the once prettily organised networking landscape.

This issue will examine what these changes in technologies and the market mean for the sector. How can the residential and business consumer best be served? What does the future hold for network operators of all types?

Europe II 2008 Media Pack; Click here

March II 2008

Fredric Morris
Editor-In-Chief
Connect-World

This is the first in a series of eLetters that will - from time to time - explore some of the issues and risks inherent in the growth of Internet access and the Information Society. The use of such powerful new tools as data mining to analyse personal data collected on the Web, for example, has significant social and personal implications that call for international regulatory action. Most of you, my readers, are involved in some way with ICTs - many, perhaps with the questions raised by this letter.

How do you feel about these questions? What needs to be done to take proper advantage of the technologies while containing the risks?  What sort of regulatory action, what sort of international action is called for? Write to me, I would like to include your thoughts and opinions in future eLetters. fredric.morris@connect.world.com

Correlated beyond all recognition, advertising, and the death of privacy 

Once upon a time advertising was just a way to send a company’s message to a consumer. It was a one-way street. Today we are moving in a different, disturbing, direction.

I am not against advertising; it is an important driving force in our economy. It helps us make choices. It informs us of many things we really want to know or are not aware of, but should know about. I think some ads are truly sensational, but then, I even like catalogues. Advertising supports all the broadcast programming we see on free TV, makes magazines and newspapers affordable and one day soon will be bringing the same sort of benefits to your mobile phone.

Targeted advertising, or ‘addressable advertising’ as it is now called, is the goal of today’s advertisers and, by extension, all advertising vehicles. The idea is to address ads targeted to match each individual consumer’s profile. Understanding the consumer’s profile, their interests, needs, wants and desires can - in principle - let advertisers address highly specific messages to each individual. The difference between principle and practice is, in this case, far from trivial. Although this may seem innocent, many of the implications are not.

The data to learn about customer preferences is available. There is a staggering amount of collectable data flowing over the world’s networks. It can be, and is, collected in a great number of ways at a great number of locations, by a wide variety of interested organizations and individuals.

Websites, governments, cable company set-top boxes, mobile phone platforms, suppliers, and location-based services among others, all gather information about us - their citizens, users and buyers. The data and information they gather, properly analyzed, tell them much more about us than we suspect. Governments use the information they gather to profile people and find terrorists, tax-evaders, criminals, track epidemics and much else. Advertisers want to understand how to reach and sell to customers, so that is how they use the data.

The main search engines save data about every search we make, they know if we are concerned about a medical problem, visit porn sites, dating sites, care about model trains, have a police record, buy books about history and like lingerie - Sorry! Is that your wife? Perhaps not? Do you have a mortgage, a credit rating?

It is amazing the sort of things a search engine knows about you. But it is not only the search engine you use, it is the sites you visit, the social networks you use, it is Facebook and YouTube - in fact it could be any site you try to access and some you don’t, you just get re-directed there by an innocent looking link.

What is more amazing are the sorts of things today’s best data mining systems can piece together from the odds and ends. Data mining software and banks of computers can cull facts and correlations from otherwise intractable masses of data. Some of the more innocent uses can be found on the Microsoft AdCenter Labs website. The Labs’ software can predict a user’s age, gender, readiness to buy or sell, or interest to engage in another sort of transaction based upon the user’s recent search history. It can also funnel and analyse search patterns and keyword usage in a wide variety of other ways.

It gives me a creepy feeling to think about the data mining done to target consumers and for other less innocent reasons. We are being relentlessly stalked every time we buy something with a credit card, when we watch a show on cable TV, search for something - really everything and anything - on the Web. Anytime we do anything on the Web, we are subject to the scrutiny of all kinds of data snoops. The high gods of consumerdom know things about us we even we do not know ourselves - and they are getting better at it every day. The world’s governments might know even more and what less savoury groups, including those with criminal intent, might know is frightening.

Yahoo according to one report, and I am certain Google as well, can predict ad response rates and even the time of day the ads will work best. Yahoo, like Microsoft, can analyse the online behaviour on its network, and spot potential buyers at various stages of their on-line search. The depth of analysis and correlation that the best data mining software can perform is awesome. They might for example, based on where you live, the searches you do and the diverse interests you have be able to predict which films you like and which automobiles will interest you. In addition, data miners can analyse the sort of politics you are likely to believe in, what new products you will love and hate, what - if any - books, magazines and newspapers you might like to read.

There is so much data that there is no way to analyse it properly without powerful computers and sophisticated software. There is also no way to act upon the information and devise an appropriate return without, again, powerful computers and sophisticated software. Assuming we can analyse the data and frame a response, the need remains to get the message to the target at the right time and place, but current platforms are designed with just this sort of interactivity in mind.

IBM recently announced a new project called Kittyhawk, to build a worldwide, distributed, supercomputer. The Kittyhawk platform will, they expect, be able to run the Internet, - the entire Internet - alone, as a single application, and replace the current fairly random assortment of interconnected computer networks. The migration of the Internet to one platform, should it ever happen, combined with Kittyhawk’s massive computing power (16,384 racks with up to of 67.1 million cores and 32 petabytes of memory) will increase the power of data mining power to unimaginable levels. Some of the Kittyhawk speculation sounds more like science fiction than fact.

Many of the potential dangers of uncontrolled data mining are obvious, but there is a more subtle, little understood danger that resides in the very nature of data mining: the knowledge discovery methodology employed, the algorithms used to spot patterns and trends and the correlations encountered between the data elements. The process sifts through vast amounts of data searching for patterns not easily seen or found by simpler forms of analysis as they are hidden by the volume and complexity of the data. Neural networks and a variety of mathematical tools are used to spot patterns and calculate the degree of correlation between different types of data. So far, so good, there is no problem with the process; there is a problem, though with way people understand the results.

There is an old saying, “There are three kinds of lies: lies, damned lies and statistics”. I always attributed it to my father - he repeated it often, but according to the Wikipedia, Benjamin Disraeli said it first and Mark Twain later popularized it in the U.S. We need to remember this well whenever we analyse correlations and other sorts of statistical analysis; the numbers may be right, but interpretations often lie.

Correlations are among the most misunderstood mathematical tools. When data is strongly correlated, we tend to assume they are interrelated or even that one of the items causes the other. Gasoline, beachwear and ice cream sales may be strongly correlated - they all go up in the summer - but one is hardly the cause of the other. Genes that produce supermodels might correlate with wealth, fame, newspaper scandals and the garment industry, but the genes are hardly the direct, sufficient, cause of any of these.

In extreme cases, the searches of serious scholars using the Web might be correlated with serial murderers, perverts, tax evaders, terrorists or in some way with whatever else they may be researching.

These cases might be exaggerated, but the guilt by implication - or correlation - and the invasion of privacy that data mining implies are real issues. Data mining results in the wrong hands can destroy credibility, put jobs at risk, destroy families, and create opportunities for blackmail.

The risks might not be obvious, but today’s Big Brother is a computer programme linked to the Web. We, and our lives, might be correlated beyond all recognition, and I see little serious government action anywhere to contain the danger.

Our next Connect-World Europe Issue will be published later this month. This edition of Connect-World will be widely distributed to our reader base and, as well, at shows where we are one of the main media sponsors such as: Sviaz / Expo Comm (14-18 May, Moscow), FT Mobile Media Conference (15-16 May, London), Wimax World Europe (29-31 May, Vienna), and Von Europe (11-14 June, Stockholm).

The theme for this issue will be, The evolving ‘Net’ - Rising to the challenge of rising use.

When speaking of networks, conventional wisdom and traditional business models no longer work as they did. The lines are blurring in the fixed, mobile and even broadcasting markets. Wired networks now handle traffic once thought suitable only for wireless and wireless is substituting wired in a broad range of applications. Seamless handoffs between wired and wireless networks –and,  indeed, mergers, partnerships and consolidations bringing together networks and players of all sorts – further confuse the once prettily organised networking landscape.

This issue will examine what these changes in technologies and the market mean for the sector. How can the residential and business consumer best be served? What does the future hold for network operators of all types?

Europe II 2008 Media Pack; Click here

March I 2008

Fredric Morris
Editor-In-Chief
Connect-World

State of the ‘Union’ - seamless or stitched together? Simple systems for simple people

The oft cited vision of seamless communications just isn’t happening. Not yet anyway, and it looks like it will take time to weave all the pieces into a whole, seamless, cloth. No doubt it will come to pass, but the vision sold by operators and equipment vendors is still something of a mirage. Comments by research and consulting groups, notes in industry publications and newspapers and talk at shows all seem to confirm that the glowing forecasts of transparent, automatic, digital union between digital devices and services were premature. Seamless connectivity is growing, but like any child, it is growing in fits and starts and subject to whims and tantrums. It is still far more stitched than seamless.

The technology exists, or at least many pieces of it in the hands of several vendors, but each company has its own idea of what ‘seamless’ means and how to deliver the dreamed of ‘zipless’ telecom experience. Things were simpler in the days of black-only telephones and manual plug-in switchboards.

Today, in addition to the traditional tied-to-the wall desk phone - plain, keyset, feature phones and the like - we’ve got mobile phones, PCs with Skype, instant messaging and email, conferencing with virtual presence, video, PDAs with WiFi and, shortly, WiMAX as well. This should make life simpler, but like so many advances that make life easier, they only make it easier to do more things at once - especially at work - and making it all work is anything but simple. At work? Where’s that? Well, today, at least in theory, it could be just about anywhere, but anyone who travels a lot know that it doesn’t always work that way, especially when time and resources are in short supply.

Have you heard about seamless connectivity? You are at home watching TV. A call comes in, it flashes on the TV screen, you pick up the handset next to you - that happens to be your cellphone linked via WiFi to your landline and your daughter appears on the TV screen. She has locked the keys inside her car. You continue talking on your phone as you go out the door to help her and the line seamlessly switches to your mobile operator’s network. After you find out where she is located, on the way to meet her, you check the Internet using an available WiFi or, soon, WiMAX network. You find a 24/7 automotive locksmith, click on the telephone number and call automatically via the mobile network. On the way back home, a colleague calls from abroad, many time zones away, on Skype; ‘we need some numbers for a meeting in an hour…’

I can go on for quite a while building ever more complicated scenarios. There are an infinite number of ways to link services, devices and application with others, intertwining personal with business uses. The connections, the uses, the possibilities, are almost limitless and I didn’t even include the role mobile video and TV will play or that of NFC (Near Field Communications) including RFIDs. It’s a great picture, a story to warm the heart of any techno-freak, equipment supplier, applications developer, operator or business. Just one problem - that’s not the way it works, at least not yet, in the real world. Despite the hype about seamless connectivity, too many pieces of the puzzle are still missing and some - such as open connectivity via interconnection and clearing hubs between operators and service providers instead of separate one-to-one agreements for roaming, SMS interchange and the like - are still in the works.

We all know how frustrating and counterproductive it is when you can’t reach the right family member, friend or business associate to resolve a problem, to organize an encounter or just to pass on a bit of news that can’t wait or when you can’t access services or information - then and there - when you need it. At home this might cause stress, problems, missed opportunities and misunderstandings. At work, this can cost big bucks. It happens all the time; since there is not much we can do about it today we just chalk it up to experience or overhead. Seamless communications promises to resolve these types of problems.

At the moment, businesses are leading the march through the minefields towards unified communications. Most really big companies will find it takes vision, faith, courage and lots of cash and time to unify a multitude of legacy systems which often do not speak with one another. Seamless, unified communications, in most instances, will call for centralised - and, needless to say, expensive - infrastructure and standardisation of much of the equipment in the field, scattered in offices and installations around the globe and even in the hands and homes of their staff members. It is no wonder that many companies, although they recognise the benefits, are dragging their feet and waiting before committing the resources needed for such an arduous transition. The costs will certainly come down over the next few years, and by planning the normal evolution of internal systems and the normal, programmed, replacement of equipment in the field with seamless connectivity in mind, companies will be able to migrate somewhat more gently into unified communications.

IP-driven systems, especially Voice over IP (VoIP), and the sort of context-based services that only truly large-scale systems can provide mean more than just cheaper communications. Existing systems inflexibly map each service, each user and device to a specific number and a highly specific access scheme. In the future, employees will take a unique system-wide access number with them wherever they are. With this number, they will be accessible, by anyone, wherever they are and conversely will have access to whatever services and information they need, or are authorised to access from any company facility throughout the world. This sort of two-way access to people and resources will tend to further accelerate the trend towards decentralisation, reduce traffic and increase the percentage of home-based workers.

Given their vast experience, infrastructures and technical competence, not to mention their spider-like position at the centre of the communications web, it is no wonder that the large international carriers are all looking at the seamless communications market. Local operators, especially mobile operators, are developing options for the home and SME (small and medium enterprise) markets. A number of the largest network suppliers are planning to offer network management services to support operator and enterprise seamless connectivity programmes.

I wonder, given the number of systems, services, applications and devices - and developers’ unstoppable urge to keep adding bells and whistles - how many of these wonderful seamless features and services we are going to use? I don’t know anyone who uses or knows of all, or even most, of the features on their cell phones or their MS Office applications. Despite dealing with ICTs and complex systems all my life, when it comes to applications I am a simple person. I like sophisticated solutions, but I like them simple. I like solutions that do everything, but hide their complexity behind slick and simple to use interfaces. I know everyone talks about how easy seamless connectivity will be, but based on past experience with mindlessly complex ‘simple’ systems, I am wary. Will the systems be truly seamless, truly super-simple to use systems or will they be overblown, over-hyped, stitched together crazy-quilts with everything you never wanted to use?

Connect-World: Africa & the Middle East (200 will be published next month. This edition of Connect-World will be widely distributed to our reader base and, as well, at shows where we are media sponsors such as: ITU Telecom Africa (12-15 May, Cairo), Tunisia Telecom, (Tunisia, 22-25 October), and GSM ME Gulf and North Africa (UAE, 2-3 December).

In addition to our normal global mailing, this issue will also be distributed to a select list of world leaders, to the ranking executives of the world’s largest companies including the Fortune 1000, to government authorities, and to international institutions. This issue will also be available on our website to all other interested readers throughout the world.

The theme of Connect-World: Africa & the Middle East (2008), our coming edition, will be Convergence and data - pushing the limits of the network, pushing the limits of economic and social development.

The growth in data transmission, together with the exponential rise in video and images in general, and the tendency to funnel more through fewer, converged, networks are largely fuelling the need for greater broadband capacity and speed. Not so long ago, we looked to universal telephony as a goal all nations should strive for to meet the needs of their citizens. Today, the growth of the Information Society has raised the bar; universal access to broadband is now the goal - indeed the necessary pre-condition – for digital, economic and social inclusion. This has stretched the resources of governments, service providers, equipment suppliers, businesses and all others involved in the provision and use of broadband.

The need is evident, but there is much to do not only to rollout broadband access and pay for it, but also to make the best use of it to contribute to economic growth and the personal well-being of urban and rural users alike. What should we all be doing, what can be done, not just to provide broadband, but also to use it productively?

Africa and the Middle East 2008 Media Pack; Click here

February II 2008

Fredric Morris
Editor-In-Chief
Connect-World

Mobile in Barcelona -

Mobile broadband, cheap smartphones, operating systems, software and the killer around the bend

The Mobile World Congress (MWC) in Barcelona used to be called the 3GSM Congress. The name is new, but its importance and the spirit of anticipation remains. Each year, basic shifts in the mobile sector are signalled by the keynote speakers and the new products and services announced at the MWC.

This year’s show, as expected, was all about the promise of broadband, broadband-based services and applications, and the standards and devices needed to deliver on the promise. In his keynote address, Vodafone’s CEO Arun Sarin best summed up where the sector is going and where it should be going. He focussed upon two subjects, the proliferation of mobile operating system software products and the competition between LTE (Long Term Evolution) and WiMAX 4G broadband standards. His call to simplify the mobile world’s development through further standardisation resonated strongly with operators - and many manufacturers and applications developers as well. There are now some 30 or 40 mobile operating systems in use today. Mr Sarin would like to see that reduced, at most, to four or five and let the market decide which systems best meet their needs.

Most of today’s handsets use the manufacturer’s proprietary operating system, so when Google announced its Android ‘open’ mobile operating system it upset everyone – from Nokia and Motorola to Microsoft and the Linux fans. Mr Sarin’s plea is a needed call for sanity and standards in an increasingly software dominated sector.

Mr Sarin also suggested that integrating WiMAX with LTE may be the best way to move forward, perhaps by incorporating LTE and WiMAX within common TDD-based standards.

TDD? Time Division Duplex - TDD - is an increasingly popular way to provide simultaneous two-way broadband for mobile. FDD - Frequency Division Duplex - a more commonly used technology slices the available bandwidth into time slots and proportionately allocates them to the incoming and outgoing traffic, imperceptibly interleaving them on the same channel. FDD needs two channels - one outgoing, another incoming. Since traffic in each direction is segregated by channel, excess capacity in one direction cannot be used to handle peaks in the other direction. TDD, given the same total bandwidth as TDD, efficiently utilises whatever capacity is available for traffic in any direction; it provides much greater effective, useable, bandwidth than FDD. Mr Sarin called for a combined TDD-based WiMAX/LTE standard to end the counterproductive wrangling between existing 4G standards.

Generally speaking, the Mobile World Congress was a showcase for the sardine-can school of mobile design - let’s see how many functions, features and gadgets we can cram into a mobile phone the size of a sardine can. Equipment suppliers and operators alike seem to think super/hyper loading handsets with features is the way to go, the way to catch and keep subscribers, so super-stuffed devices with features nobody uses are quite popular. Nevertheless, several recently announced products counter the Swiss Army knife - do it all in one box - trend and move in the other direction by radically simplifying handset features. Most of the simple designs are low-cost efforts aimed at emerging markets. Apple’s wildly popular iPhone takes the middle course; it maintains the complexity, but simplifies the interface so people can actually use more of the features. It is no wonder that it has set the standard to beat.

Two announcements, in particular, delighted me. First, it was heartening to see ZTE announce the first commercial SDR (software defined radio) base station. In my second eLetter in January I predicted that SDR would be coming to the market shortly; I just didn’t expect it so soon. I also didn’t expect SDR base stations would come sooner than handsets. It makes sense though - just ‘add new software and serve’ when you wish to transmit a new standard, use a different frequency or adopt a different modulation scheme. The base station, which initially supports GSM and WCDMA simultaneously, uses software instead of application-specific hardware to process the signals. In the future, according to ZTE’s news release, the platform will also be able to support CDMA and WiMAX.

As a first step towards an SDR world, the base station makes sense. It is a lot easier, considering how new and demanding the technology is, to try it out first in a big box instead of a handset. It also makes great sense to offer operators a platform that can, at least in principle, handle whatever new technology arises in any bit of spectrum that the regulators allow, with little more to do than install new software. I was looking forward to SDR handsets, but this is still a great first step.

The next bit of news that truly pleased me was the ultra low cost Smart Entry Phone (SEP) aimed at emerging markets. It would have pleased me even more had the price been announced, but the Mobile ULC2 Alliance - consisting of Infineon Technologies, Jurong Technologies Industrial Corp. Ltd, TJAT Systems Ltd. and Brightstar, has been careful not to release any price data, although they do claim it is the world’s lowest cost smartphone. Talk, speculation really, at the MWC puts the price at under US$100, even at below US$50. The phone, targeted at emerging markets throughout the world, will provide access to the Web, email, location-based services and IM (instant messaging). According to the press release, the SEP combines “exceptionally low operational costs with no requirement for additional infrastructure purchases”. It has been apparent for some time - and numerous studies support this - that given the developed world’s saturated markets, most new mobile subscribers will come from the developing economies. Indeed, ABI Research believes that by 2011, one of every four handsets sold globally will be ultra low cost handsets.

I have written several times before that ultra low cost ‘smart’ handsets were bound to come. A variety of such devices are sure to reach the market in the near future. The astounding size of the market at the bottom of the pyramid will inexorably drive growth, competition and the development of better, cheaper, devices. Low cost smartphones will likely become the world’s dominant form of Internet access within the next few years. Smartphone will bring far more than email, games and messaging - they will be vital business tools, sources of education and of a still unimaginable variety of services.

The show, above all, demonstrated the growing dominance of software. From Software Defined radios and software-driven smartphones to operating systems, software - always strong - is growing yet stronger in mobile communications. Network management, operational support systems, business support systems, diagnostics, security and marketing - the operators’ entire operating structure, content and user applications all depend entirely upon software. The newer the product, the newer the service, the more it depends upon software.

Okay, you’re impressed with the stranglehold software has on the industry - so am I. The show, though, never lets one forget that software without hardware has nowhere to go. And the hardware is getting slicker and slicker; some of it is downright mouth watering. There’s the iPhone, of course, and a growing number of iPhone ‘wanabees’- some great feature-rich phones. There’s no iPhone killer yet, but given the hot and heavy innovation seen at the MWC, Apple needs to run fast, there’s a killer just around the bend.

Connect-World: Africa & the Middle East (200 will be published next month. This edition of Connect-World will be widely distributed to our reader base and, as well, at shows where we are media sponsors such as: ITU Telecom Africa (12-15 May, Cairo), Tunisia Telecom, (Tunisia, 22-25 October), and GSM ME Gulf and North Africa (UAE, 2-3 December).

In addition to our normal global mailing, this issue will also be distributed to a select list of world leaders, to the ranking executives of the world’s largest companies including the Fortune 1000, to government authorities, and to international institutions. This issue will also be available on our website to all other interested readers throughout the world.

The theme of Connect-World: Africa & the Middle East (2008), our coming edition, will be Convergence and data - pushing the limits of the network, pushing the limits of economic and social development.

The growth in data transmission, together with the exponential rise in video and images in general, and the tendency to funnel more through fewer, converged, networks are largely fuelling the need for greater broadband capacity and speed. Not so long ago, we looked to universal telephony as a goal all nations should strive for to meet the needs of their citizens. Today, the growth of the Information Society has raised the bar; universal access to broadband is now the goal - indeed the necessary pre-condition – for digital, economic and social inclusion. This has stretched the resources of governments, service providers, equipment suppliers, businesses and all others involved in the provision and use of broadband.

The need is evident, but there is much to do not only to rollout broadband access and pay for it, but also to make the best use of it to contribute to economic growth and the personal well-being of urban and rural users alike. What should we all be doing, what can be done, not just to provide broadband, but also to use it productively?

Africa and the Middle East 2008 Media Pack; Click here