February I 2008

Fredric Morris
Editor-In-Chief
Connect-World

Results … 8,440,000 for mobile trends 2008 (0.03 seconds)

Since the Mobile World Congress (ex 3GSM) in Barcelona is coming, I thought I would write about mobile trends. I have always been something of a trend watcher, but a bit of research never hurt, so I called Google to the rescue. Google’s response - in three hundredths of a second - is above. I tried and tried, but could only skim the first million results. One thing I didn’t find was a trend towards better, more intelligent response to search queries, mobile or otherwise. Sure, there are efforts to better the search engine responses, to provide quality instead of quantity. It’s far from being a trend yet, but that is a trend I would truly like to see.

Surprise! The growth in cellular telephony will continue and developing countries will show high growth rates. Surprise! Handsets will get cheaper and have more functions stuffed in. Surprise! More people will use their mobiles to access the Internet. Obvious? Obviously! Enough surprises.

A few trends are worth examining. Trends are long-term phenomena not flash fads. Many of the trends I see are just starting , are still toddling, but they all promise to grow steadily and run strongly in the coming years.

Broadband, not voice, is shaping up as the real driver of both mobile innovation and operators’ dreams of higher ARPUs (average revenue per user). WiMAX / LTE /4G will certainly grow strongly. It might seem that WiMAX and LTE (long-term evolution - a third generation approach to high speed GSM broadband) will be shooting it out on main street at high noon, but early reports show clear and separate tendencies for each technology - LTE is the technology of choice for operators with big investments in existing networks and WiMAX will tend to be the choice of greenfield operators. The CDMA camp has a third option, UMB, but it is far behind in the race and may not finish. Still, no one really has a clear idea of how or even exactly when major network rollouts will take place.

Unlike previous mobile rollouts, handsets will not provide the initial thrust needed. Packing the needed circuitry into the handsets - see my last eLetter - will increase the complexity, size, cost and power consumption of both WiMAX and LTE handsets. Since most of today’s HSPA (high speed packet access) broadband networks are still mostly under utilised, many in the industry expect the new technologies will take several years to ramp up and achieve commercial success.

Wireless modems for laptops and even fixed access points for broadband Internet access in remote or hard to reach regions are among the real early drivers of wireless broadband. Wireless broadband will be a godsend in regions where there is little copper, but enough public or private money for broadband. Parts of Asia, Eastern Europe, Russia, and Latin America are likely to be early large-scale adopters.

Obviously, mobile applications, entertainment and the like will push wireless broadband adoption, but for the next few years, the time it will take to get an affordable and technologically attractive handset to the market , growth will be limited to users - likely business users - who must have broadband access and are not put off by power, size or cost restrictions.

Many of the trends building up a head of steam are building upon broadband. IP-based mobile video is one of these trends. It is already gaining an avid following in some parts of the world, but until the costs of both the handsets and the service come down it will grow, but not explode in the market. Mobile IP telephony, a sort of Skype on wheels, should take off once unblocked broadband becomes common; this worries some operators greatly, and they will fight a battle they know they will lose just to stretch the revenue stream from their current technologies. As mobile broadband grows, so will IP-based services and SMS will tend to wither away.

Mobile operators will recuperate part, perhaps all, of the revenues lost to IP telephony through mobile advertising which will subsidise a great many services much as advertising does today with broadcast radio and television. Some of the advertising supported services will be available only to viewers who actively agree to receive advertising material, but others such as broadcast mobile television will probably follow the old tried and true commercial broadcast model. Since social networkers, virtual world participants and MMOG (massively multiplayer online games) players, given the enormous amount of time they tend to spend online, are sure to become targets of choice for many advertisers, they are likely to benefit from a great number of advertising supported services.

As 3G mobile broadband brings down the cost of always-on connectivity, mobile social networks will grow and become an integral part of the lives and lifestyles of people as they move about during the day. Video blogging and all other forms of online personal/public interaction will inexorably grow in step with mobile broadband.

Network operators throughout the world are beginning to recognise there are costs associated with trying to hold back the inevitable coming of open networks. The mobile operator’s Frankenstein Monster, Google’s Android and its Open Handset Alliance, is just the latest of a long list of challenges operators face trying to control the services their subscribers use. It is only a matter of time, but the trend towards open networks and unblocked devices will not be stopped. Like it or not, it won’t be many years before mobile operators will have to put up with just about any handset, any device, any use, media, content or application their subscribers wish. DRM (digital rights management) as we know it today is dying; it may take a while, but the handwriting is on the wall.

Mobile commerce, mobile shopping and mobile financial services will grow to the point they threaten traditional (even on-line-traditional) services. The growth in the use of mobile phones as credit/debit card devices, the growth (finally) of location based services, the availability of highly sophisticated mobile search services, and the fact that mobile phones are always with the user, will all push the mobile commerce phenomenon to greater heights.

The trend towards using mobile devices as a means of payment will grow. I expect mobile phones will largely replace cash and credit cards within the next 10 to 15 years. Mobile phones equipped with circuitry for near field communications are already being used to pay for public transportation and vending machine purchases in some parts of the world. The security and speed of electronic payments and the low cost per transaction (it is cheaper to process an electronic transaction than to handle, control and account for cash) will foster the growth of mobile payment systems. It seems obvious that both financial institutions and mobile service providers will both want to control this market, so competition between these sectors as well as financial services/telecommunications services mergers and acquisitions will become increasingly common.

I don’t know if I will see it yet at this year’s Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, but during the next few years we should begin to see the ‘Internet of Things’ and the mobile world join forces as RFID readers are incorporated into mobile handsets.

What we are certain to see at Barcelona is a frontal attack on the iPhone; big touch screens with sexy applications are sure to abound and the ghost of Android, Google’s open source operating system, will be hovering about.

There are a good number of other interesting trends, and we’ll get to them when I have more space, time and inspiration.

____________________________________________________

Our next Connect-World Europe issue will be published later this month. The issue will be widely distributed to our reader base and, as well, at shows where we are one of the main media sponsors such as: Mobile World Congress (ex-3GSM), Barcelona (11-14 February), CeBit, London, (March 4-9), IPTV World Forum, London (12-14 March), and SOFNET, London (21-24 April).

The theme of this issue of Connect-World Europe will be - From broadcast to broadband - it’s show time!

Distinctions among traditional services providers are increasingly blurred. Not so long ago, the last-mile technology service providers used essentially defined what they were and gave them control over their users - they ‘owned’ the subscribers to their services. Today, IP-based converged networks mean traditional voice, data or video service providers can - all of them - economically deliver any and all of the services offered by any other type of player. Nowadays, service providers may no longer own their customers; indeed - heresy of heresies - they may not even own their own networks. Skype, Google TV, MySpace and YouTube did not even exist a decade ago, yet they are a mighty threat to ICT sector business as usual.

Telcos offer IPTV and data, cablecos offer phone service and data and ISPs offer whatever service they can, and all are poaching upon territory that once belonged exclusively to the broadcasters. The competition is growing, although in many cases the income still isn’t - the traditional companies with the experience and the customers have an edge - but that is changing and so are the business models.

The profound changes IP networks bring to the sector are, perhaps, most clearly seen in the planning by nearly all service providers to provide entertainment, and in the rapid proliferation of entertainment delivery platforms. The impact upon the broadcast sector cannot easily be calculated, but everyone involved in delivering entertainment - content providers, the advertising industry, telcos, cablecos, ISPs and equipment manufacturers among others - is affected. As the sector ramps up to meet the demand for the new services, regulators, lawyers, manufacturers, carriers, service providers and the consumer will all have significant changes to deal with and difficult decisions to make.

The issue will examine the changes the sector - exemplified by, but not limited to, IPTV - as seen through the eyes of the regulators, service providers, manufacturers, indeed, all those struggling to make the transition to new models. The game is changing; it’s a new show.

Europe I 2008 Media Pack; Click here

January II 2008

Fredric Morris
Editor-In-Chief
Connect-World

Radios, slipsticks, mobile devices, antennas and computers - marching to the beat from superhetrodyne to software, from sardines and porcupines to fashion shows

Once upon a time, many years ago, in the age of the vacuum tube radio receiver, stone-age cool called for blithe references to superheterodyning. You didn’t really have to know what it meant, it just sounded good - something like quoting a philosopher you never read to support a specious argument. It sounded cool. Nerd cool in those days meant you had a slide rule hanging from your belt and had a plastic protector jammed with pens of all colours in your shirt pocket. You never saw a slide rule? Well there were no computers or even electronic calculators, but a slipstick wizard could calculate all sorts of amazing things - even satellite orbits - with one of those.

Slide rules died when the Hewlett-Packard HP 35 hit the market in the early 1970s. I bought the HP as soon as soon as I could afford it and brought it to work. I remember clearly being told the damn thing would never fly - you just couldn’t get enough buttons on anything that small to equal the glorious flexibility of a K&E Log-Log Duplex Decitrig slide rule - with an ‘F’ scale instead of a ‘K’ scale if you were into designing radios. But who cared? Slide rules had no decimal points - you just had to know where to stick them, but the HP had ten significant digits and a decimal point in the right place. In no time at all, calculators had so many buttons for hard to calculate functions that evolution started selecting for engineers with skinny fingers that didn’t hit two buttons at a time (the sons of these same engineers now design mobile phone keyboards). Faster than you could say, ‘Log-Log Duplex Decitrig with Vector Hyperbolic Functions’, the slide rule died; there were no ceremonies or flowers and few mourners.

Back to the radios, heterodyne means to mix two frequencies together to produce a ‘beat’ frequency, namely the difference between the two. Superheterodyning, originally supersonic heterodyning, creates a beat frequency lower than the original signal; this solves a series of radio design problems and reduces amplifier power requirements.

Radios are marching to a different beat nowadays!

I was reading reports of the CES show in Las Vegas earlier this month. There were a great number of product announcements for cell phones, GPS, mobile TV, WiMAX, WiFi and the like and the fact that so many of them were being put into the same devices. I started thinking about the difficulties of stuffing so many radio technologies and so many frequencies into the same sardine can.

Think about them (in alphabetical order, please): Bluetooth (2.4 GHz), FM radio 87.5 - 108.0 MHz; GPS (1.1 – 1.6GHz); GSM (GPRS, EDGE -900MHz, 1800MHz); Mobile TV (MediaFLO, DVB, DMB - 200 – 800MHz); NFC (Near Field Communications -13.56 MHz); UMTS (WCDMA, HSPA, LTE - 2100MHz); UWB (Ultra-wideband - 3.1 -10.6GHz); Wi-Fi (2.4GHz, 5.8GHz); WiMAX (2.5GHz, 3.5GHz). I think I’ve got them all - at least ten basic categories, 16 or so technologies and, no matter how you count them, a whole lot of frequencies. If we put each of these into separate boxes, the size of the first superheterodyne radios, we would need a horse-drawn cart to carry them.

It seems we are moving inevitably towards the day when all of these technologies will have to share space in the same handheld device with cameras, screens, speakers, microphones, videos, music players, agendas, calculators and a long list of other components and applications.

Handset manufacturers are doing an incredible job of packing new functions into thinner and thinner, smaller and smaller devices, but there are limits. Since everything is implemented in hardware, physical and cost limits will soon be reached. Each new device and circuit adds cost, complexity and size.

What chip designers have done so far is amazing. The ASICs (application specific integrated circuits) that have been built to incorporate multi-band, multi-function circuitry are amazing, and there is a strong tendency to stick with these tried and true, thoroughly understood technologies. Nevertheless, the writing is on the wall.

One day soon, I expect the sardine-can design trend will grind to a halt and, faster than you can type a ‘UR kewl’ SMS, someone will come out with a commercial software defined radio device (SDR) mobile telephone and today’s technology will be deader than the slide rule. It’s simple; the manufacturing economies, smaller devices and increased flexibility of the new devices - once the bugs are worked out - will be unbeatable.

The software defined radio can, in principle, function in any frequency band and handle any signal modulation scheme by using software to process the signals. The earliest versions, some 15 years ago, were developed by the U.S. military to consolidate a variety of field communications devices into a single easily carried and maintained piece of equipment. The capabilities of these devices were far from those we would expect today to handle the sophisticated mobile communications we have become accustomed to, but they worked. There have been amateur, quite limited, versions of the SDR running on PCs with soundboards that can send and receive different radio signals using special software.

The proponents of SDR often see it as a first step towards the development of a cognitive radio, a radio that is sufficiently ‘intelligent’ to verify the available radio spectrum, compare it to the user’s communications needs, and dynamically configure and reconfigure cost/quality/frequency optimised communications sessions.

We can’t do it all yet, at least outside the lab, the processing speeds for the higher frequencies are just too fast for today’s processors to handle directly, power requirements for SDR radio frequency front-ends are still quite high and antennas that can efficiently handle such a wide range of frequencies are hard to design. Still, if I had to guess, I would say that in five years or less SDR will conquer as much as ten per cent of the market.

Oddly enough, the first problem, limited processing speeds for high frequency signals, has an old solution - superheterodyning. Remember? ‘Superhet’, to its close friends, works by lowering RF (radio frequencies) to the IF (intermediate frequency) range under 40 MHz. This relic from the early days of radio is still a mainstay of modern design.

The power problems are serious, but I expect they will yield in short order to advances in manufacturing and signal processing technologies. The antenna worries me more. Although great strides have been made in smart antenna design, the variety of technologies that must be accommodated is daunting. Mobile TV, LTE, UWB and GPS, for example, each pose separate, difficult, technically diverse problems for antenna designers.

Fortunately, as in the case of the sardine model for stuffing multiple mobile devices in the same can, nature has given us models for a new solution - porcupines and hedgehogs. It will be difficult to slip an antenna covered, bristly, device into your pocket or into a protective case, but as fashion shows have proved year after year, there is no shortage of weird designs to examine or weirder designers to work on the case.

____________________________________________________

Our next Connect-World Europe issue will be published later this month. The issue will be widely distributed to our reader base and, as well, at shows where we are one of the main media sponsors such as: GSM World Congress (Mobility World Congress), Barcelona, Spain (11-14 February), CeBit, London (4-9 March), IPTV World Forum, London, UK (12-14 March) and SOFNET, London, UK (21-24 April).

The theme of this issue of Connect-World Europe will be - From broadcast to broadband - it’s show time!

Distinctions among traditional services providers are increasingly blurred. Not so long ago, the last-mile technology service providers used essentially defined what they were and gave them control over their users – they ‘owned’ the subscribers to their services. Today, IP-based converged networks mean traditional voice, data or video service providers can – all of them - economically deliver any and all of the services offered by any other type of player. Nowadays, service providers may no longer own their customers; indeed - heresy of heresies - they may not even own their own networks. Skype, Google TV, MySpace and YouTube did not even exist a decade ago, yet they are a mighty threat to ICT sector business as usual.

Telcos offer IPTV and data, cablecos offer phone service and data and ISPs offer whatever service they can, and all are poaching upon territory that once belonged exclusively to the broadcasters. The competition is growing, although in many cases the income still isn’t - the traditional companies with the experience and the customers have an edge – but that is changing and so are the business models.

The profound changes IP networks bring to the sector are, perhaps, most clearly seen in the planning by nearly all service providers to provide entertainment, and in the rapid proliferation of entertainment delivery platforms. The impact upon the broadcast sector cannot easily be calculated, but everyone involved in delivering entertainment - content providers, the advertising industry, telcos, cablecos, ISPs and equipment manufacturers among others – is affected. As the sector ramps up to meet the demand for the new services, regulators, lawyers, manufacturers, carriers, service providers and the consumer will all have significant changes to deal with and difficult decisions to make.

The issue will examine the changes the sector - exemplified by, but not limited to, IPTV - as seen through the eyes of the regulators, service providers, manufacturers, indeed, all those struggling to make the transition to new models. The game is changing; it’s a new show.

Europe I 2008 Media Pack; Click here

January I 2008

Fredric Morris
Editor-In-Chief
Connect-World

eHolidays - shopping, traffic, third place and dropping notes

Traffic, crowded parking lots, difficulties with routine purchases, and a computer that died, started me thinking about year-end shopping, on-line help, changing markets and changing habits.

In many parts of the world Christmas shopping, the frantic rush to get presents for family and friends, starts in November. In the United States the Christmas shopping season unofficially begins on Black Friday. On Black Friday, the day after the Thanksgiving holiday - always celebrated on the fourth Thursday of November, most Americans do not work. Each year on this day stores reduce prices on a wide variety of merchandise; this draws great numbers of shoppers.

In recent years the advent of eCommerce has given people the option of shopping online. This has reduced the traffic on the roads and reduced some of the traffic at the stores, but not enough to alert a casual observer. Still, the Nielsen Online site reported that the 120 online retailers it tracked on Black Friday saw e-shopping growth of ten per cent this year - some 21.2 million unique visitors this year compared to 19.2 million last year. Web traffic for consumer electronics rose 235 per cent from Friday the week before. In second place, traffic for computer hardware and software grew 121 per cent. I sort of expected that; nowadays it isn’t Christmas if you can’t plug it in.

What surprised me was the growth of shopping comparison portals, in third place, registering a 95 per cent growth in traffic.

Several hours before Christmas Eve, I drove to a nearby supermarket to buy light bulbs and a few odds and ends. Normally a very quick drive, it took more than half an hour of creeping along in intense traffic; last minute shoppers clogged the major roads and slowed traffic even in my quiet neighborhood.

Back home, I ran into traffic once again, this time on the Internet, checking shopping comparison sites looking for a laptop to replace one that recently died in service - it bit off more Connect-World than it could chew.

I am not much of a holiday shopper - any kind of a shopper for that matter, except when in need. When I do shop, I like to see what I am buying. I pick up laptop after laptop, feel the weight, check the keyboard, hinges and screen and go from store to store to check the prices. At least that’s how I used to do it. Nowadays, instead of ‘hitting the street’, I surf the Net. Holidays or peak hours I still run into traffic, but it’s on the Internet; I find what I am looking for sitting at my desk. I might run to a store for a final check, but only after I have compared the specs, the reviews and prices on the Internet and am 99 per cent sure of what I want.

People are slow to change, but the advantages of comparing and buying online are so evident that even creatures of habit, and I am one, now prefer the Web - especially when the specific items and brands are well-known or when the decision is predominantly rational - based upon objective considerations (technology, price…) as opposed to personal preferences, style and taste.

The Internet really helps shoppers; the mobile Net with time will help more. We have all called someone for advice when we can’t find an item we are trying to buy. Mobile phones and a number of new sites make this even easier. A quick search of the Internet for mobile services turned up a wide variety of mobile shopping comparison sites for house hunters, electronics, books (even a Japanese language version of Amazon.com) among many others. There is even a mobile site (MizPee) serving several U.S. cities, which quickly finds public restrooms while one is out shopping and in need.

Needless to say, both Google and Yahoo have their own mobile comparison shopping sites. Not to be left behind, some operators let their subscribers compare prices, browse and buy items from their phones - Verizon Mobile Web 2.0’s mShopper site is an example. One can purchase items seen on mobile shopping sites using credit cards. Visa (no doubt others as well) offers pre-paid card vouchers that let people without credit cards shop online.

The comparison shopping scene is quite innovative and promises to become even more so. If an item you are looking at has a barcode, you can phone, text or access Frucall on the mobile Web with your smartphone or PDA to check prices and alternatives. If someone hasn’t already done it, I am sure that one day soon there will be a service that, when you point your cell phone’s camera at a barcode, will check your position using the phone’s built-in GPS system and find the best price in the neighborhood for the item you are looking at.

Raymond S.T. Lee of the Department of Computing at Hong Kong Polytechnic University has proposed the use of intelligent, “mobile agent-based systems”. The systems use “fuzzy-neuro agent” technology and provide “intelligent mobile web shopping” on any WAP-ready mobile device. As far as I can tell, this service is not yet available, but it is interesting to see the sort of thought and effort going into mobile shopping.

‘Contextual’ online shopping will let one ‘click and buy’ products that appear, for example, on mobile TV, and there are services that let you hold your cell phone to a radio or TV, automatically identify the music playing, download it to your phone and charge your credit card.

Today, one can select holiday greeting cards and send them online to family and friends. When you remember to send a card to someone while on the street, you can send it - then and there - via your cell phone.

The number of ‘real’ holiday greeting cards I receive keeps dropping year by year - as do handwritten notes and letters. Although this might not please greeting card companies, it does help save the world’s forests.

____________________________________________________

Our next Connect-World Europe issue will be published later this month. The issue will be widely distributed to our reader base and, as well, at shows where we are one of the main media sponsors such as: GSM World Congress (Mobility World Congress), Barcelona, Spain (11-14 February), CeBit, Hanover, Germany (4-9 March), IPTV World Forum, London, UK (12-14 March) and SOFNET, London, UK (21-24 April).

Distinctions among traditional services providers are increasingly blurred. Not so long ago, the last-mile technology service providers used essentially defined what they were and gave them control over their users – they ‘owned’ the subscribers to their services. Today, IP-based converged networks mean traditional voice, data or video service providers can – all of them - economically deliver any and all of the services offered by any other type of player. Nowadays, service providers may no longer own their customers; indeed - heresy of heresies - they may not even own their own networks. Skype, Google TV, MySpace and YouTube did not even exist a decade ago, yet they are a mighty threat to ICT sector business as usual.

Telcos offer IPTV and data, cablecos offer phone service and data and ISPs offer whatever service they can, and all are poaching upon territory that once belonged exclusively to the broadcasters. The competition is growing, although in many cases the income still isn’t - the traditional companies with the experience and the customers have an edge – but that is changing and so are the business models.

The profound changes IP networks bring to the sector are, perhaps, most clearly seen in the planning by nearly all service providers to provide entertainment, and in the rapid proliferation of entertainment delivery platforms. The impact upon the broadcast sector cannot easily be calculated, but everyone involved in delivering entertainment - content providers, the advertising industry, telcos, cablecos, ISPs and equipment manufacturers among others – is affected. As the sector ramps up to meet the demand for the new services, regulators, lawyers, manufacturers, carriers, service providers and the consumer will all have significant changes to deal with and difficult decisions to make.

Europe I 2008 Media Pack; Click here

December II 2007

Fredric Morris
Editor-In-Chief
Connect-World

“Comes the storm…”- winning or losing the cyber-security battle

Trying to keep track of the cyber-security question is a bit like watching a ball game where no one, even the players, knows the score. The security companies all huff and puff about the difficult battle they are winning, but the bad guys just don’t seem to stay down - they get flattened into pancakes by the steamroller, get up, and keep coming. It’s Looney Tunes all over again.

Surfing the web, I came across some predictions by Symantec’s Director of Emerging technologies, Oliver Friedrichs, concerning the biggest security problems for the coming year. The scary list includes:

* Bot evolution - decentralised, peer-to-peer hacker networks built from co-opted PCs exemplified by the so-far undefeated Stormbot network;

* Web threats: known trusted websites infected with malware - malicious code that attacks site visitors;

* Mobile threats - Hackers and crackers will certainly target mobile threats. The Apple iPhone, Google’s ‘GPhone’ Android software, Microsoft Windows Mobile and other platforms that offer kits to applications developers will be hit. Financial services, such as online banking, auctions and funds transfer applications will certainly be among the targets;

* Virtual Worlds, especially those with virtual property that can be sold for real money and sites where personal information can be obtained from unwary users will be especially sought out by hackers;

* Presidential elections - According to Mr Freidrichs, during the last US presidential elections, there were phishing attacks and denial of service attacks aimed at certain candidate’s sites. This election, according to statements on the Web, he expects a number of ‘typo-domain sites’ will mimic the candidate’s sites. If someone mistypes the official site address they might accidentally open a false, look-alike, site. Some will donate money to the campaign through the false sites, so, “when contributions come in, they’re either pocketed or contributed to someone else’s campaign.”

The director of antivirus research for F-Secure, Mikko Hypponen, according to ZDNet UK, claims that the database of malicious code it has built over the last 20 years has doubled since the beginning of this year. That is an astounding number; I am sure they have not been sleeping for 20 years.

Spending an hour checking security-related sites on the Web is enough to convince one that the crooks are getting bolder, more sophisticated, stronger, richer and harder to find. Companies and individuals alike are being taken in, used and abused.

What happened to the nerds who hacked for fun and prestige and the geeks who cared only about their technical prowess and their membership in the elite hacker community?

The malware industry is more daring, audacious and commercial than ever. Those that know where to look can buy enough malware software and services online to go into business for themselves. Some hacker software is sold as legitimate tools, to find vulnerabilities and check the security of a user’s own system - and some people actually use them for this purpose; many others, though, use these tools as weapons for less innocent ends. Really nasty stuff, I’m told - I didn’t find, or at least recognize, any of this myself - is also available online.

A lot of effort goes into hiding the traces of illegal activity, so the hacker/cracker and malware sector of the economy is not easily measurable, but it seems obvious that it is growing by leaps and bounds and is siphoning significant amounts of cash into its coffers.

The site of the CSI Computer Crime & Security Survey for 2007, states: “The average annual loss reported more than doubled, from US$168,000 in last year’s report to US$350,424 in this year’s survey. Reported losses have not been this high in the last five years. Financial fraud overtook virus attacks as the source of the greatest financial loss. Virus losses, which had been the leading cause of loss for seven straight years, fell to second place. Of respondents who experienced security incidents, almost one-fifth said they’d suffered a ‘targeted attack’, i.e. a malware attack aimed exclusively at a specific organization or targeted group.”

An acquaintance of mine who claims to be an old-time ‘do it for the glory’ hacker who has even tipped off software manufacturers about vulnerabilities in their systems, says that “virus and Trojan kits” often come from the developing regions of the world. He assures me that, despite their dubious origin, some even sell technical assistance contracts for their products. Much of this business is conducted via Internet relay chats (IRCs) and forums where boasts abound. Spammers are a big market for the hackers’ services. They need all the help they can get to sneak past the increasingly sophisticated anti-spam defences deployed in recent years.

Spammers can buy or even rent, so I’m told, a wide variety of sophisticated software to torment us all. The Internet-based malware supermarket has a variety of services and tools for botnets, phishing, denial of service attacks, Trojans, worms, anti-detection software and much else besides. Indeed, you can find just about anything you need to intrude, take-over, borrow, trick, or steal can be found, bought or hired on the Net or through the IRCs. Russians hackers are said to be the scourge of the Net; they offer everything, often at very low prices. There is also an open market in stolen credit card details. Credit card details, according to several Web reports about the ‘industry’, cost very little - less than one dollar per card in bulk quantities. Enough information to get away with identity theft costs less than US$100.

Organised crime, it is said, is often involved in online schemes; it can be more profitable and less risky than traditional crime.

Of all the threats in hacker/crackerdom, the ‘Stormbot’ is possibly the most nefarious. Named after the subject of the email it was first sent out with, “230 dead as storm batters Europe“, thousands of variations of the same ‘bot’ have been sent out since it was first launched in the beginning of 2007.

A Botnet is a network of sorts comprised of software robots - the ‘bots’, which are bits of software that travel automatically through the Internet carrying out their own programmes. Hackers normally use groups of ‘Zombie’ computers to disseminate the bots. The Zombies have been taken over, without their owners’ knowledge, by malware programmes call Trojan Horses, backdoors, worms and such, and can be remotely controlled by the hacker to spread and control a great variety of viruses, spam and bots. The use of Zombie computers makes the source of the attacks they spread devilishly difficult to spot.

The Storm botnet supposedly consist of more than one million co-opted computers tied together in dynamically changing configurations. Since the servers that control ‘Storm’ constantly change their names and location within the botnet’s peer-to-peer network, they are exceedingly difficult to find and stop. The botnet’s commanders have launched denial of service attacks against security experts that have tried to find and neutralise (kill) the bot’s control centres.

The bot’s controllers are very sophisticated - some of the communications with the bots use encryption and they can generate hundreds of functionally different versions per day. Security vendors and law enforcement agencies have not yet been able to get a fix on the ‘Storm’.

While writing about the ‘Storm’ just now, I recalled one of my professors dramatically quoting a line from an anonymous Anglo-Celtic poem. I checked the only words I remembered - “When comes the storm”, on Google and found it at once. The poem is bad, even worse than I had remembered, but - when comes a Stormbot - it can be far worse.

Still, the complete line from which the words I remembered came is strangely prophetic: “When comes the storm of rain, and gusty air / your secrets close are scattered everywhere.”

____________________________________________________

Our next Connect-World Asia Pacific issue will be published later this month. The issue will be widely distributed to our reader base and, as well, at shows where we are one of the main media sponsors such as: PTC, Hawaii, USA, 13-16 January 2008 and Carriers World, Hong Kong, 11-13 March 2008.

The theme of this issue of Connect-Word Asia Pacific will be: Broadband - network strategy for core and access.

Broadband is the game, the future of telecommunications – wired and wireless alike. What are the today’s best growth strategies? How do you pay for the buildout? How do you fill the pipes later? How do equipment manufacturers, the software developers, content providers, regulators and, yes, the users, fit into the new environment?

Asia-Pacific I 2008 Media Pack; Click here

December I 2007

Fredric Morris
Editor-In-Chief
Connect-World

Mobile telephony, open platforms and telegraphy - Google that!

The Mobile Web is the World Wide Web accessed via a mobile phone or PDA instead of a computer. The screen is small, but it is always with you when you need it. It is spawning a great number of new services such as SMS, entertainment, cell phone payment and fund transfer systems, location-based services and the like - it’s a very long list.

The Mobile Web even has its own sponsored, ICANN sanctioned, top-level domain name - .mobi, dedicated to mobile phone sites. Not impressed? Well, its financial backers (Google, Microsoft, Nokia, Samsung, Ericsson, Vodafone, T-Mobile, Telefónica Móviles, Telecom Italia Mobile, Orascom Telecom, GSM Association, Hutchison Whampoa, Syniverse Technologies, and VISA) are.

A lot of thought and effort is going into new and better services. The goal of the W3C’s Mobile Web Initiative, for example, is to develop Mobile Web-related best practices and technologies to make mobile Web browsing easier and more reliable. A good idea, but I suspect that Google’s recently announced ‘Android’ platform will do more to promote mobile Web use than any other recent initiative.

Google, through the Open Handset Alliance, allied itself with 33 other companies - including many giants in the sector such as Sprint-Nextel, eBay, Motorola and Intel - that will integrate the Android with their own software and hardware and with third party applications to guarantee Android’s impact and staying power.

Although some major telephone operators around the world are part of the Alliance - China Mobile, KDDI, NTT DoCoMo, Sprint Nextel, T-Mobile, Telecom Italia, Telefónica - not all major operators agree with Google’s forays into the wireless market. Verizon, which either cripples or replaces the software bundled with mobile handsets to limit and lock features to control its customers, did not join the Android alliance and AT&T executives have been openly disdainful of Google’s plans to enter the bidding for 700MHz wireless spectrum in the USA.

Google is so convinced that wireless is the way to go that it has vowed to commit at least US$ 4.6 billion to the auction - enough money to scare away some players and enough to make the incumbent wireless players nervous. The Google war chest stuffed with billions upon billions of idle dollars and their promise to put up ‘at least’ US$ 4.6 billion of their hoard must be sending shivers up and down a number of corporate spines as they wonder how to get a few extra billions to increase their bids.

Reports of the Android announcement quote Google CEO Eric Schmidt - responding to questions about how their bid for the 700 MHz spectrum is related to their plans for Android - as saying: “We think the 700 MHz network auctions are a matter of public policy and for public benefit, but Android will run well on it.” How nice, such a marvelous coincidence!

Android, states Google, is an open, ‘comprehensive’, mobile platform with a set of tools that make it easy for any programmer to develop applications for mobile devices. The Open Handset Alliance’s effort resulted in a completely open, Linux-based, operating system for mobile devices. All the current operating systems are closed, proprietary, platforms. Google is engaged in an effort to change the mobile world’s technological ecology and turn wireless into an open environment similar to the Internet itself. Android is the opening round of a revolutionary battle.

Phones that use Android will be truly open; operators, for example, will no longer be able to block functions such as WiFi reception - a truly frightening thought for companies such as Verizon and AT&T that have inherited all of the Bell Telephone monopoly genes. Android will, no doubt, run a full set of the growing list of free Google applications including a browser, email (sorry, Gmail), Google Earth and Google maps (complete with its location-based advertising opportunities and social network-like comments function). In short, Android’s starts the game with a handful of cards a poker player could die for.

Other companies such as Apple, Palm, RIM, Symbian, even Microsoft with its Windows Mobile, already have a stake in mobile software and all are threatened by Android’s open platform. Early reports indicate that Android’s code - until the inevitable software bloat sets in - is relatively compact and efficient. This is especially promising for the low-end phone market. There are many more cell phones in the world than computers and, especially in developing economies, many more low-end than high-end handsets. Android, if it lives up to its promise, will make it possible to deliver a satisfactory Internet experience even with low-cost mobile devices. This could lead to explosive growth in Internet access by people in developing regions.

The arrival of a new, heavily backed, free, open, low operating overhead, mobile platform is a truly significant event for many reasons. Competing platform developers are digging in for a do-or-die battle, but the biggest battle will be elsewhere!

Traditional operators must quake at the thought of fully open, unblocked, phones using Google controlled spectrum, with free - or really inexpensive - access based upon an advertising-financed business model. Should Google win the bidding, a nationwide wireless network in the USA will add to its ad revenues and, inevitably steal a significant number of subscribers from the likes of Verizon and AT&T. We may be seeing the end of an era controlled by the heirs of the Bell system in the USA - and incumbents everywhere - and the beginning of a new one, controlled by the leading Internet powers.

The incumbent operators will be tough to fight. Their existing customer base is enormous, they already have spectrum and are willing to fight to the end in courts and legislative hallways. They have weapons and will use them.

We can count on Verizon and AT&T, for instance, to do everything in their power to keep Google from getting a piece of the spectrum and to keep Android-powered ‘Gphones’ off their networks. Nevertheless, Android is an open platform, and someone is bound to develop software that will let Android access just about any network, Even so, Google might have trouble competing against the operator-subsidised handsets that account for most of the sales in many markets.

Google, on the other hand, has cash, a powerful list of allies to match its powerful list of enemies and, perhaps most important, it may have history on its side. The Internet has spawned an open culture, an expectation of free access, that has great social and economic momentum on its own. The idea of essentially free, ad-driven, communications will resonate far beyond the boarders of the USA where the first great battles of this high-tech Armageddon are likely to be fought.

Whatever happens in the opening skirmishes the sector will never be the same. In the end all technologies and business models have their day and go the way of the telegraph.

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Our Connect-World Global Visionaries 2007 issue will be published later this month. The issue will be widely distributed to our reader base and, as well, at shows where we are one of the main media sponsors such as: International CES (7-10 January 2008, Las Vegas), CTIA Wireless 2008 (April 1-3, 2008, Las Vegas), and the National Association of Broadcasters (NAB) event (April 11-17, 2008, Las Vegas).

The theme of this issue of Connect-World Global Visionaries 2007 will be - The world’s on a string - using ICT to tie it together.

Information and communications technologies (ICTs) are powerful tools, they are changing the way we work and the way we play. The global economy and the lives of many people have changed dramatically as a result of ICTs, and there is a broad consensus – almost faith – in the ability of ICT to solve many, if not all of the world’s problems. The United Nations’ World Summit on the Information Society (WSIS) concentrated upon the use of ICTs to create an information society and move forward to meet the Millennium Development Goals. Not a day passes without some new notion about how ICT will create a better world.

What is lacking in much of this talk is a hard-headed notion of some of the practical steps we must take to actually have some impact upon the major challenges that humanity faces.

We have all heard the old saying, “a journey of a thousand miles starts with a single step”. I suspect mankind’s journey to solve the major global challenges needs thousands, if not millions, of small, practical, steps. There is an old saying that, ‘every complex problem has a simple answer, but it is probably wrong!’ Complex problems need many simple answers.

We have asked leading decision makers from around the globe to give us a few of their own answers.

November II 2007

Fredric Morris
Editor-In-Chief
Connect-World

Governing the Internet, alphabet soup and irrational enthusiasm

The Internet Governance Forum, the IGF, established during the 2005 World Summit on the Internet Society (WSIS) in Tunis, had its second general meeting in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, November 12-15, 2007. More than 1200 people from around the world – legislators and lords, leading businesses and NGOs, ministers and regulators, technicians and philosophers, the Internet’s founders and its developers, experts in cyber crime and others that use ICTs to help people - gathered to discuss how the Internet could better contribute to the development goals set-forth during the World Summit on the Information Society (WSIS).

There were some frightening moments for the acronym and abbreviation challenged among us - I include myself - lost in the midst of a letter blizzard. Half of the acronyms began with the letter ‘I’ - IP, IPRs, IPv4, IPv6, ICANN, IANA, IETF, IGF, IGOs, IXPs, but there was a liberal sprinkling of other letters - RIRs, DRM, APC, ccTLD, DOI, F/OSS, NAP, NAT, NRO, TLD, WITSA… The list goes on forever - look them up if you like. The substance came through, but simultaneous acronym translation would have helped.

The panels were interesting - at times excellent, but somewhat predictable. Debate, given the number of people involved was limited. The moderators did a good job, but I often wished for a gadfly - an ‘im-moderator’ as a friend calls them - to stir things up a bit.

There was a cast of truly high-level keynoters and panel members, but the debate wherever you stopped in the corridors was often better and more interesting.

The discussions were organised around five main themes: Critical Internet Resources; Access; Diversity; Openness; and Security.

Although much of the discussion about critical Internet resources centred around the availability of names and numbers, the discussions were much broader and included questions of infrastructure standards, interconnection, training of human resources and a great number of somewhat esoteric technical resource issues. Since the IGF is a UN initiative it is no surprise that political and governmental issues often surfaced and at times predominated.

A contentious issue, a recurring debate, not only with regard to the resources issue, but somehow woven into every theme, was the question of possible US Government interference with the Internet. The WSIS in Tunis established the IGF, in part, as a way to find answers to questions such as these. Although some militated strongly for the elimination of US government influence upon Internet governance, many others, a majority it seemed, felt that the Internet was doing well - that there was little evidence of undue influence. ‘If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it’, was a phrase heard a number of times in the hallways and, at least once, on stage. Nevertheless, few objected to the idea of a new, truly multi-stakeholder, wholly non-governmental, approach to governing the Internet and its resources.

Although the Internet has seen phenomenal growth - more than one billion people now have access to it - more than five billion people do not yet have access to this vital tool for economic, social and personal development. It takes more than just stringing wires or setting up WiFi hotspots to provide effective access. The access problem is complicated. Investors are needed, of course, to build the infrastructure, but many countries lack the sort of stable legal and regulatory structure that guarantees investors a reasonable level of safety.

‘Access to Access’ was a concept debated in the hallways. Universal access programmes might, for example, build backbones and local access networks, but capacity building for the basic skills needed to use the technology, to understand and use the information on the Net, is essential to bridge the digital divide.

Indeed, I asked Vint Cerf the Internet’s co-inventor - Bob Kahn, the other co-inventor was there as well - if the IGF could accomplish only one thing, what would it be. He first spoke of the need to move ahead with IPv6, but quickly reflected, and shifted to the need to deal with “capacity building in terms of access”. He went on to explain that this needs to be done on a country-by-country and region-by-region basis if we are to meet the Millenium Development Goal of capacity building, if we are to successfully include the world’s remaining 5.5 billion people.

Returning to the overriding technical and practical issue Mr Cerf was equally concerned by the need to deal with the limited number of IPv4 (Internet Protocol version 4) numbers remaining for distribution. The last address blocks will be distributed within the next two years or so. Although it will take another few years to exhaust these numbers, and many little-used blocks might be traded and re-used to provide address for a bit longer, we need a definitive solution. According to Vint Cerf, we need to push the Internet Service Providers to move to IPv6 (Internet Protocol version 6), which provides a vastly greater number of addresses, and hook all the IPv6 using ISPs together.

Peter Dengate Thrush, the new Chairman of the Board of ICANN, the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (he recently took over as Chairmen from Vint Cerf) and Paul Wilson, the Director General of APNIC, the RIR or Regional Internet Registry that allocates IP and AS numbers in the Asia Pacific region, echoed Vint Cerf’s concern about the predictable exhaustion of Internet address stocks. All are quite concerned by the sluggish progress of IPv6, and the lack of movement within the ISP community to upgrade to IPv6 and to effectively interconnect. It is a complex issue that urgently needs more attention than it has been getting.

Today, Internet users that do not read or write in English and cannot understand the Latin alphabet are effectively excluded from most of the content on the Web. A conference workshop concentrated upon the interoperability of multilingual Internet directories and the use of the semantic web to resolve multilingual interoperability. The diversity of languages and needs of potential Internet users was much discussed. A great deal of progress is being made towards the adoption of International Domain Names that will facilitate the use of the Internet by non-English speakers and those who do not use the Latin alphabet.

The need to maintain openness of the Internet is evident. Free, open, access by everyone has long been one of the Internet’s primary characteristics. The IGF had a good number of sessions where ‘openness’ was discussed in terms of government censorship and human rights, but since so many sessions were concurrent, I could only attend a few. I was somewhat disappointed, although not surprised, when the few sessions I managed to check upon seemed more devoted to politically correct platitudes than effective measures.

The Internet security issue, in addition to all the expected cybercrime, terrorism, personal data protection questions generated a quite a bit of heated, passionate, discussion about the protection of children against sexual attacks and exploitation over the Internet. A number of NGOs dedicated to the Issue were there and The Council of Europe’s Convention on the Protection of Children against Sexual Exploitation and Sexual Abuse drew quite a bit of interest. This issue became one of the highest priorities of the Rio de Janeiro IGF meeting.

Despite the real dedication of so many to the pressing human issues such as access and child abuse, I suspect the Internet issue that will truly mobilise the world within the next few years will be capacity. For most, the wallet, the most sensitive organ of the human body, speaks more loudly than the heart. Without major investments to build capacity, the growing need for capacity to handle the deluge of video content, YouTube for example, will overload the Web within the next two years or so. Nemertes Research Group calculates the cost at US$137 billion. This, and substantial investments in equipment and systems for IPv6, will fuel a great deal of Y2K-type irrational – and rational – exuberance in the market for years to come.

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Our next Connect-World: Global issue will be published later this month. The issue will be widely distributed to our reader base and, as well, at shows where we are one of the main media sponsors such as: International CES (7-10 January 2008, Las Vegas), CTIA Wireless 2008 (April 1-3, 2008, Las Vegas), and National Association of Broadcasters (NAB) (April 11-17, 2008, Las Vegas).

The theme of this issue of Connect-World Global Visionaries will be: The world’s on a string - using ICT to tie it together

Information and communications technologies (ICTs) are powerful tools, they are changing the way we work and the way we play. The global economy and the lives of many people have changed dramatically as a result of ICTs, and there is a broad consensus – almost faith – in the ability of ICT to solve many, if not all of the world’s problems. The United Nations’ World Summit on the Information Society (WSIS) concentrated upon the use of ICTs to create an information society and move forward to meet the Millennium Development Goals. Not a day passes without some new notion about how ICT will create a better world.

What is lacking in much of this talk is a hardheaded notion of some of the practical steps we must take to actually have some impact upon the major challenges that humanity faces.

We have all heard the old saying, “a journey of a thousand miles starts with a single step”. I suspect mankind’s journey to solve the major global challenges needs thousands, if not millions, of small, practical, steps. I have heard all my life – my father repeated this frequently – that, ‘every complex problem has a simple answer, but it is probably wrong!’ Complex problems need many simple answers. What is yours? What are some of the simple things, the first steps, we might take using ICTs to help deal with major global challenges, such as global warming, poverty, health, education, wars…?

November I 2007

Fredric Morris
Editor-In-Chief
Connect-World

Swiss Army knives, in your face, in the air

The mobile phone is becoming today’s electronic Swiss Army knife. It is accumulating functions at an amazing - some might say, alarming – rate. Smartphones are getting smarter, they send and receive text messages, view videos, take, send and receive photos, substitute credit cards, play games, substitute a Windows-based PC in a pinch, connect to the Internet and do more other things than I can easily list.

About a week ago I read that the International Air Transport Association (IATA) approved a new use for the cell phone - as an airline ticket. The new standard, which IATA hopes will be in use by 2010 lets one buy airline tickets via text messages and receive a barcode confirmation on the mobile phone’s screen. Upon checking in at the airport, one need only flash the barcode to a reader, no other ticket or paper needed. IATA estimates the use of cell phone barcodes could save the airlines as much as US$ 500 million per year. Barcode tickets would probably work just as well at sporting events, concerts, films, conferences - any place where admission has to be controlled.

Speaking of mobile phones at airports, the use of mobile phones on airplanes - still prohibited - is being tested by airlines around the world. Several announced plans to test and offer an in-flight cell phone service at rates comparable to current international roaming charges. The credit card swipe phones found in many airplanes nowadays are just too expensive for most people to use. Dubai’s Emirates airlines dropped prices down to an ‘inexpensive’ US$5 per minute and is said to log as many as 13 thousand minutes per month; this, according to my source, is apparently some sort of record. In 2006, Emirates announced that it would inaugurate in-flight cell phone service in January 2007 at rates approximating those for international roaming, but as far as I can tell, the service has not yet started.

Surprisingly, although many people would love to see cell phones on airplanes, many more are against it. Few people are willing to give up the unconnected privacy of a flight, and fewer still want to put up with the incessant chatter of an addicted cell phone user during a long flight. For this reason, many airlines will be reluctant, even if the authorities approve, to allow unrestricted cell phone usage. Some proposals call for a ‘tap-instead-of-talk’ option, permitting smartphones and Blackberry-like devices to send emails and text, but prohibiting voice communications. Limits on call duration and hours when calls might be permitted have been discussed. There has even been talk of setting aside a small glass enclosed space for cell phone usage.

WiFi service is another story. Airlines the world over are planning to offer this service in 2008. Some airlines such as Emirates, Singapore Airlines and Lufthansa already offer the service. Boeing spent over one billion dollars on its Connexion by Boeing (CBB) satellite-based WiFi service, but ultimately pulled it off the market because demand, at least at the prices they had to charge, did not measure up to their projections. Connexion had problems not only with users, but with airlines that were not at all happy with the system’s 800-pound weight, the cost of installation and the weeks an airplane was out of service while it was being installed.

Despite Boeing’s problems, the FAA has reportedly received more than 40 applications this year to fit new aircraft with WiFi systems in the USA.

In June of last year, AirCell paid US$ 31.3 million at the United States’ Federal Communications Commission auction for exclusive rights to the digital spectrum needed for air-to-ground WiFi services. American Airlines and Virgin America have already signed agreements to install AirCell’s system in the coming months.

The system is much lighter - about 100 pounds, cheaper and faster to install than previous systems. AirCell claims the system will provide 3.1 megabit per second uploads, similar to DSL speeds. The system needs only two small antennae to communicate with 100 or so cell towers spread throughout the USA, each with an effective radius of 250 miles. AirCell will expand its coverage to Canada, Mexico and the Caribbean within a year. It is a good economical system, as far as it goes, but the ground-based system doesn’t go quite far enough for those of us that have to cross an ocean or two.

The pricing for the service has not been finalized, but early reports claim it will cost about US$ 10 per flight or per day and those who subscribe to services such as TMobile or Boingo would pay a special reduced fee to log on. Speaking of prices, if your first thought - like mine - was, ‘right, I’ll just log onto Skype to make my calls’, forget it. Skype probably won’t work; there are tools to block voice transmission and the airlines, no doubt, will use them.

Two companies, Row 44 and Panasonic Avionics Corporation are trying to walk the waters Boeing’s service drowned in. They intend to offer globe-circling satellite-based services people can afford. Row 44 uses Hughes technology to provide up to 81 megabits per second broadband connectivity for Web-surfing, email and, possibly, even international television access. Initially Row 44 will cover all of North America. Service for Europe, the Middle East, South America, Asia and trans-oceanic routes will be phased in. Alaska Airlines will be their first customer for the service.

Panasonic Avionics Corporation, a leader in the in-flight entertainment sector, claims to have the least expensive system because they use existing technology and satellites instead of their own network. Airlines, no doubt, are pleased that they can install the lightweight system during regular scheduled maintenance. Panasonic expects to start service by mid-2008, but has not yet announced the airlines with which they are negotiating. Panasonic’s user interface is integrated into its in-flight entertainment systems.

Although airlines are initially likely to cut on-board access to Skype, I wonder how long the prohibition will hold up. On the one hand, they all talk about avoiding annoying chatter during flights, on the other, they are all investigating on-board pico-cells for GSM access. The sale of WiFi enabled handsets is growing rapidly. Carriers in some markets expect that by next year more than half the handsets they sell will have WiFi chips. Given the ease and low-cost of the WiFi services, some airlines will certainly offer this service to gain a competitive edge and others are sure to quickly follow.

The real question is, how long it will be before the ‘in-your-face’ competition between the likes of Facebook and Google takes flight - literally - and they begin to subsidise airborne WiFi so they can bombard captive airline passengers with ads.

For the record, Facebook recently closed a US$ 240 million investment and advertising partnership with Microsoft and plans to mine the treasure trove of data it has about its participants to target advertising to them. Facebook is a social networking phenomenon. It grew to 50 million users in a year and continues to add more than 200 thousand new users per day. Many people use Facebook instead of email for personal contacts and there is no reason to believe it will be different in the air than on the ground.

Google, a past master at the data-mining-targeted-ad, and no slouch at social networking, just announced plans for an open software platform that will compete directly with Microsoft’s Windows Mobile. Google built an alliance with a broad-based list of heavy hitting wireless players - including HTC and Motorola, T-Mobile, and Qualcomm - that will serve as the nucleus of a development community for the platform and the phones that will use it.

Google - whose readiness to slug it out nose-to-nose and toes-to-toes with Microsoft (and now with Facebook) any time, anywhere, is no secret - can be expected to compete fiercely with anything Microsoft/ Facebook does in the air. Count on Microsoft, as always, to return the favour.

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Our next Connect-World: Global issue will be published later this month. The issue will be widely distributed to our reader base and, as well, at shows where we are one of the main media sponsors such as: International CES (7-10 January 2008, Las Vegas), CTIA Wireless 2008 (April 1-3, 2008, Las Vegas), and National Association of Broadcasters (NAB) (April 11-17, 2008, Las Vegas).

The theme of this issue of Connect-World Global Visionaries will be: The world’s on a string - using ICT to tie it together

Information and communications technologies (ICTs) are powerful tools, they are changing the way we work and the way we play. The global economy and the lives of many people have changed dramatically as a result of ICTs, and there is a broad consensus – almost faith – in the ability of ICT to solve many, if not all of the world’s problems. The United Nations’ World Summit on the Information Society (WSIS) concentrated upon the use of ICTs to create an information society and move forward to meet the Millennium Development Goals. Not a day passes without some new notion about how ICT will create a better world.

What is lacking in much of this talk is a hardheaded notion of some of the practical steps we must take to actually have some impact upon the major challenges that humanity faces.

We have all heard the old saying, “a journey of a thousand miles starts with a single step”. I suspect mankind’s journey to solve the major global challenges needs thousands, if not millions, of small, practical, steps. I have heard all my life – my father repeated this frequently – that, ‘every complex problem has a simple answer, but it is probably wrong!’ Complex problems need many simple answers. What is yours? What are some of the simple things, the first steps, we might take using ICTs to help deal with major global challenges, such as global warming, poverty, health, education, wars…?

October I 2007

Fredric Morris
Editor-In-Chief
Connect-World

The future of FutureCom and the future of telecom in Brazil

FutureCom is the highlight of the telecom year in Brazil. It has always been held away from the biggest cities in Brazil - in recent years in FlorianÛpolis a lovely beach city in southern Brazil. Away from the major cities and the hordes of technicians, FutureCom is a show reserved for the real leaders of the sector. The show is running out of space, so next year it moves to S„o Paulo - much to the dismay of many who fear the dilution of its high-level networking.

Every year for the last ten years the Brazilian telecom community has come together at FutureComís annual love-hate industry fest. Prior to FutureCom, that is prior to the privatization of Brazilís telecom sector, the event was run by the government and called Semint. From the beginning, the event attracted the top decision makers, the wielders of contract-signing pens from the telcos, and all those seeking to sell them something. Even today, the Minister of Communications and the President of Anatel, Brazilís telecom regulatory agency and the chief telecom advisors from the President of Brazilís staff are always at the event.

The event, by far the best in all Latin America, attracts participants and journalists from throughout the region, but the focus of the show is Brazil. The conference sessions are among the finest and best attended of any I have seen in any part of the world. The Presidents of all of Brazilís major telco operators speak at the conference and everyone, friends and foes alike, listen intently for whatever clues they might get about how the industry giants will behave. Indeed, instead of the sort of institutional speeches one ordinarily expects at conferences, one often feels like an eavesdropper in a private conversation between the keynote speakers; statements made by one will often elicit responses, thinly disguised, in the talks of later speakers.

This year the responses had one target - the Minister of Communications, HÈlio Costa. In his address at the opening ceremonies, the Minister took the mobile operators to task for the high prices charged for mobile services and called for a reduction of the rates. During his address, one could hear the muttering and comments in the audience - a packed house ëguesstimatedí by me at two thousand people, ìWhat about the taxes; are you going to cut the taxes?î The next day, predictably, the presidents of all the mobile operators had speeches and presentations ready that emphasized the impact of taxes - at more than 40 per cent among the very highest in the world. Only Turkey, Tanzania and Uganda have higher taxes on communications. The Minister-bashing, very well disguised as technical presentations that fooled no one, went on throughout the next day and made for lively, if unprintable, discussions during coffee break get-togethers and in the hallways.

The tax burden, which the Minister conveniently forgot to mention, raises prices, pushes costs and depresses earnings - among the lowest in the world, except where operators are still struggling to pay off their 3G spectrum purchases. The low earnings and slow return on investment - amply discussed in some of the presentations - also makes it harder, and more expensive, for local operators to go to the capital markets to finance the growth of broadband and networks or for their migration to 3G.

State budgets depend upon the substantial tax revenues they collect from the telcos. The taxes are easy to collect - auditing the telcos is simple, so collection costs are low - and they arrive on time. Many studies show that dropping taxes would stimulate substantial increases in the use of telecommunications and, as a result, overall economic activity. Other studies show usage would increase so much if rates went down that tax collection would rise. Nevertheless, the states fight to maintain the status quo ñ and the income they know from experience they can count upon.

The other big topic at FutureCom was broadband - as a service, as a tool for digital inclusion, for mobile access, for corporate communications, as a driver of revenues, for IPTV, for and against WiFi or WiMAX as the solution for all the worldís needs, via copper, wireless or fibreÖ

There was no way to escape broadband at the show - or the conclusion that the biggest barrier to broadband rollout in Brazil is the government. Although it was certainly not the governmentís intention, the lack of regulation that deals sensibly with converged technologies instead of separate regulations for each service and medium, obsolescent universalization priorities and counter-productive taxes have slowed broadband rollout considerably.

The President of TelefÙnica in Brazil, Antonio Carlos Valente announced investments of more than a quarter of a billion dollars and plans to offer 1 megabit/second broadband access to 90 per cent of its subscribers in the state of S„o Paulo. He also spoke of their plans to offer IPTV in Brazil.

In Spain, more than 450 thousand TelefÙnica subscribers receive IPTV via optical fibre. A minimum of 2 Mbps is needed for an adequate, if not optimal, IPTV image; in Brazil, only a small percentage of TelefÙnicaís subscribers have service faster than one megabit per second. When high definition TV arrives, the bandwidth will have to be still greater. Nevertheless, according to Valente, TelefÙnica is investing large sums producing exclusive content for its trials. TelefÙnica is assuming a certain risk, though, since the regulatory situation is not quite clear regarding the right of telephone operators to offer subscription TV services to its clients. No one is quite sure, given the somewhat contradictory legal opinions, about the right of a telephony concession holder to offer subscription TV.

Despite IPTVís clouded legal status, Luiz Eduardo Falco, the President of Oi one of Brazilís largest fixed and mobile operators, also announced plans to invest in IPTV starting in Rio de Janeiro.

Ricardo Knopfelmacher, the President of Brasil Telecom, speaking about the cable TV laws, claimed that cable TV only reached 159 of the 1953 towns and cities where Brasil Telecom offers ADSL broadband service. Since the law does not let telcos offer broadcast services these municipalities do not receive the subscription TV services that the telcos might easily provide.

Brasil Telecom already offers IPTV video on demand. They would offer a full range of video programming, but they have not yet been able to get approval from Anatel, the regulatory agency.

Mr Knopfelmacher also spoke of the need to re-evaluate and change the universal service obligations the government has imposed upon the fixed telephony operators. According to Mr Knopfelmacher, 61 per cent of the two thousand telecommunications service posts they maintain as part of their univeralisation obligation have not been visited in over a year. He suggested that the obligation to maintain these posts be substituted for an obligation to bring broadband connections to schools.

Groups promoting digital inclusion, such as eBrasil, have long promoted the substitution of current service obligations for others that benefit society more. It is not a very controversial suggestion; even the Minister favours this and there is a bill under consideration by the Brazilian Congress to substitute existing obligations for others more in line with the needs of the country in the age of the Internet.

Interestingly, a number of speakers and participants spoke of mobile broadband not as a high-end service or a business need, but as a popular service that would soon reach low income and rural populations. The view that mobile broadband is viable not only for mobile applications, but even to connect PCs, especially in remote areas where there are few, if any, alternatives, is increasingly accepted. Considering the low costs and the access it offers to services, Marco AurÈlio Rodrigues, President of Qualcomm do Brasil, expects mobile broadband will not take long to become popular. The service will first be available at 3.6 Mbps, but will gradually grow to 42 Mbps with little additional investment - more than enough bandwidth for any currently contemplated service.

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Our next Connect-World: Asia-Pacific issue will be published later this month. The issue will be widely distributed to our reader base and, as well, at shows where we are one of the main media sponsors such as: PT Expo Comm (23-27 Oct, Beijing, China), Connect IT Pakistan, (1-3 Nov, Karachi Expo Centre, Pakistan), 3G Asia (13-15 Nov, Macau), and Mobility World Congress & Exhibition (4-6 Dec, Hong Kong).

The coming issue of Connect-World: Asia-Pacific will look at how the Internet has changed our world and the global economy. We are now entering a new stage in the Internetís growth. Web 2.0, collaboration, virtual worlds, mashups, and the Web as a platform ñ computing ëin the cloudí are all part of it. Also part of the new Web are the evolutionary moves towards the semantic/ intelligent web, the growth in enterprise services that are not mere extensions of existing services and financial services such as mobile cash and credit. The Web is revolutionising education, healthcare, government, and social services in general; and it is also generating new cultures and lifestyles.

The theme of this issue of Connect-World Asia-Pacific will be Internet usage and services.

September II 2007

Fredric Morris
Editor-In-Chief
Connect-World

The Web, the brain, science fiction, business fiction, artificial intelligence and real intelligence

Ever had a bit of music, a fragment, a phrase from a song, running around non-stop in your mind? I haven’t been able to ignore certain bits of news, statistics and whatnot I’ve come across in the last week; they seemed somewhat connected, but I was not sure just how. These disconnected notices eventually jelled into a plausible, if not necessarily probable, scenario. Who knows, the scenario just might come true sooner than many would expect.

Not so very long ago, the Internet bubble burst. A lot of companies and jobs and hopes burst with it. Things eventually picked up; the spin masters got the world spinning again. A few months ago I heard the head of a major network equipment company say that Internet traffic would grow at 500 per cent per year. This week I read an article in a newspaper someone had left in a seat near an airport boarding gate that a professor - if I remember correctly from the University of Minnesota - calculated that Internet growth is closer to 50 per cent than 500. Of course this could be temporary. The growth of IPTV, of YouTube-type services will all supercharge the growth of the net. Whatever happens, the growth of the Internet will reach unimaginable levels - it is just a matter of time.

Images of all kinds will drive an incredible amount of traffic; some for entertainment, others for education or business use and still others will be recognized and acted upon automatically. My feeling though, is that although images will generate traffic, hyper-connectivity and interoperability - everything connected to everything and working with everything - will be the true driver of growth and profitability. I’ve seen estimates that there will be at least one trillion devices hooked to the Net by 2010. This will include not only PCs, but also smartphones, RFID devices and, in time, just about anything else with a chip in it. I suspect that this sort of connectivity - and the traffic it generates - will grow much more, and much faster, than most of us imagine.

In another developing field I was reading about, Dharmendra Modha, the Manager of Cognitive Computing at IBM’s Almaden Research Center, who is trying to figure out just how to re-create, or at least emulate, as much as possible of the human brain’s functioning. He has a blog for those who wish to follow this sort of research at www.modha.org.

They are working on a reverse engineering of the brain using a “massively parallel cortical simulator”. So far, they have concentrated on re-creating a functioning mouse-brain - some 3,500 times less complex than a human brain, they say - on a supercomputer. This stretches even the resources of today’s supercomputers quite thin; IBM’s biggest take six seconds to emulate one second of what they take to be mouse thoughts. Hope is in sight; IBM expects to be pumping one quadrillion calculations per second, about the same volume as the human brain, through their supercomputers by 2010.

This is quite a bit different from the attempts, starting almost a half-century ago, to create artificial intelligence, AI, using software and algorithms to mimic intelligent decision-making. Some of the AI initiatives have dealt quite successfully with a number of problems, but overall AI has had only limited success. It ran into a series of intractable methodological and ‚Äòphilosophical’ problems aggravated by the practical limits of today’s computers.

The latest techniques will, no doubt, build in part upon AI’s successes, but IBM’s latest effort takes a different path. According to Modha’s page on the IBM website, “The idea is to re-create the ‘wetware’ brain using hardware and software.”

To understand what all this has to do with the growth of Internet traffic, we need a few more bits of the news and ideas I’ve run into or re-encountered during the past week.

One year after 2010, the year that supercomputers will begin to handle the same number of operations per second as the human brain, Hitachi expects to commercialise its new non-invasive, neuroimaging-based, mind-machine interface. The system is currently limited to simple switching decisions - operators can turn a train set on and off simply by thinking about it, but within five years the company expects that paralysed patients and others “undergoing cognitive rehabilitation” will be able to use the system to perform a variety of mind-controlled tasks. I read last week that a young girl wired with sensors is able to play Space Invaders just by thinking about the moves. Is there anything that moves faster than gaming technology?

There are many reports on the Web about research into these types of controls. Today, some of us use voice-activated controls to make and answer calls on our mobile phones. I suspect that some years from now mind activated controls will become more common. Although this in and of itself will generate more Internet traffic, the real jump in traffic will come from this in combination with a number of the other factors mentioned above.

Hyper-connectivity will by itself generate a tremendous amount of traffic; more than a trillion interconnected devices swapping information will move volumes of data unlike anything we have seen so far. Utility computing (sometimes called grid or cloud computing) using the Web as the platform will not only move data, but the programmes and applications that process it as well.

As the level of intelligence in the network - and the speed with which the network can process information and execute applications grows - and as we add ‚Äòmind-control’ applications to the mix (even if only for gaming) the overall system will reach the level and complexity of the brain. This will not be the same as the human brain, for a great variety of reasons, but the ability of this globally interconnected system with human-like, but faster, ‚Äòreasoning’ to gather, respond to, analyse and absorb information will reach awe-inspiring levels. At this point, the network itself might generate a great part, perhaps even the major part, of the total traffic.

It is fascinating to imagine how current trends and R&D might develop over the next few years, but it will be even more fascinating to see what really happens as developments such as these increasingly turn the Web into the planet’s nervous system. Will this happen soon? Certainly not entirely, but everything I am speaking of is in the works or exists in some form today. Other, still unimaginable, developments will enter the mix, others will slow down or die, but many will live on in simplified or partial form and add their richness to the mix.

This all sounds a bit like science fiction, I know. Still, in the years I’ve spent as a professional planner I have seen that truly new advanced technologies most often sound like science fiction at first. This science fiction, though, often turns into a sort of business fiction in the hands of corporate visionaries - yes, they exist and are responsible for many of the technological marvels we now take for granted. Significant business fictions often turn into significant marketable products that change society, the economy and the lives of people; just look at your cell phone.

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Our next Connect-World Latin America issue will be published later this month. The issue will be widely distributed to our reader base and, as well, at shows where we are one of the main media sponsors such as: Futurecom (1-4 Oct, Florianópolis, Brazil) and Broadband World Forum Americas (3-6 Dec, Sao Paulo, Brazil).

The theme of this issue of Connect-World Latin America will be Innovation and trends.

Innovation in the information and communication technology, ICT, sector drives a significant portion of the world’s economic growth. As in all sectors, novelty and fashion certainly pushes the market, nevertheless, the ICT driven economic boost is predominantly a reflection of the fundamental contributions these technologies bring to the economy.

New hardware spawns new software, applications and content, and vice versa. ICT innovation - new technologies, products, services and applications - increases productivity, increase efficiency, reduce costs and build revenues of provider and user alike. Innovation in the sector creates not only new business, but also new, previously all but unimaginable, businesses and jobs. Due to ITC innovations, existing businesses, through foresight or necessity, re-invent themselves, redefining, creating or eliminating jobs. New companies spring up overnight to take advantage new market opportunities. Innovations give policy makers and regulator sleepless nights, but the same innovations also make possible vast improvements in government services. e-Government is revolutionising the responsiveness of even the most tight-budgeted governments around the globe.

August II 2007

Fredric Morris
Editor-In-Chief
Connect-World

The future is black - boxes, holes, clouds, hats, eyed peas, Sabbaths and magic - hoorah!

A look at the future of computing, extreme computing, cloud computing, secure computing, cosmic and not so cosmic energy levels
Free association is not so free - it follows well-worn mental groves. I started sliding along some of those grooves after reading the latest edition of Scientific American. I’ve been reading SciAm so long that the monthly feature, ‘50, 100 & 150 Years Ago in Scientific American’, which traditionally opens the magazine, is just a bit of personal reminiscence.
The latest issue, August 2007, had an article called, “Data Center in a Box”. Although, this is not exactly a new idea, this is the first time that so much computing power was packed into a container and the first time it was designed to be mass-producible. Earlier versions were one-off, much lower power, special purpose deals. I had heard recently that Sun Microsystems had done something of this sort, but I never looked into it; I never realized just how awesome and significant it might be.
The data centre, the result of Sun Microsystems’ Project Black Box, is a study in extreme computing. Indeed, the whole centre is crammed into a standard 8×8x20 foot (a bit less than 35 cubic meters) shipping container.
Okay, they stuffed a lot of computers into a box - what’s noteworthy about that? To start with, the boxes have more computing power than most traditional corporate - big corporate - processing centres. Anyone who has followed corporate computing trends in recent years can tell you that managing the energy consumption and heat output of their centres so they can expand is one major concern that CIOs regularly moan about.
A rack of servers uses about 25 kilowatts of electricity. Most of that energy turns into heat - enough heat to turn a rack into a molten puddle. Squeeze racks, the Black Box has eight, into a small box and the problems increase exponentially as the box gets smaller. It all reminds me - okay, I’m a physicist and this is my free association - of the enormous heat and energy concentrated when a star implodes into a black hole. This black hole, though, comes with a very sophisticated system to vent and channel the hot air generated into heat exchangers cooled by water - a tremendous bit of engineering, a marvellous technological feat.
The self-contained system is complete; it needs only electricity, a data line and water to work. Of course, you can’t plug it into a wall outlet; it needs a direct connection to the power grid - a 600-amp industrial-grade power feed. Your telco’s DSL also falls a bit short of what this 250-server box needs to gulp down fresh data and spew out results; it needs a big, fat broadband pipe - a dedicated fibre connection is recommended. The box also needs 60 gallons of chilled water each minute to keep it from melting down. Other than that, the box is ready to go with seven terabytes of memory and two petabytes of storage, enough they say to support ten thousand desktop users.
According to the article, the data centre can be up and running for one-hundredth the cost, and a tiny fraction of the time, of a traditional centre of similar power. Each centre, by itself, has enough computing muscle to rank among the world’s top 200 super-computers. Need more computing power? Just drop in another box. It would help if you are located next to a major telco, a good-sized power generation facility and a sizeable waterfall, but if you can supply the power, communications and water, even a rooftop, a ship, an offshore platform, a basement or parking lot will do.
Why are these centres, the Black Boxes, so significant? Well, according to the article, the boxes are an ideal, truly cost-effective, way to quickly expand the Internet’s computing capacity and drive us into the next phase of the information revolution, ‘cloud computing’ - also called utility computing, where users rely on software and storage from the Web that they access anywhere - including from their personal, hand-held, carry everywhere, devices. If that sounds familiar, then you have been reading some of my recent eLetters.
The black boxes, then, may be the critical - quite providential - piece of the infrastructure that was missing in the plans to make mobile, personal computing the driving force in the next phase of the information revolution. Practical, mobile, personal computing may just be the glue to put together a truly worldwide information society.
Black also reminds me of the recent Black Hat hacker’s conference. I’ve never been to one, but they are increasingly significant, increasingly crowded events. Some four thousand people were there this year.
Hackers, for those who still don’t know it, are not the bad guys - those are crackers. Serious hackers perform an extremely important public service. Hackers poke and prod software to find the vulnerabilities to correct them before the crackers (the black hearted bad guys) exploit them - and you.
The keynote speaker at Black Hat was Richard Clarke, a 30-year veteran of the US Government and Bill Clinton’s chief counter-terrorism adviser on the U.S. National Security Council. Since his retirement, Clarke has been writing books. Clarke was quoted as saying at Black Hat that, “we’re building more and more of our economy on cyberspace 1.0, yet we have secured very little of cyberspace 1.0.” He went on to talk about the software that splits processing between the Web site’s server and the client - the user’s browser, and how this has re- opened Web 2.0 to some standard, long-used, attacks. Wireless broadband access, is one of the areas where this lack of security is most evident. This is a real danger facing the expansion, the expected explosion, of mobile personal computing.
Errata Security’s CEO, Robert Graham, demonstrated this danger during his presentation at Black Hat. According to the reports, he used a software tool called Hamster and Ferret to examine the airwaves for Web 2.0 sites. Graham quietly used the software, while speaking of other matters, to ‘sniff’ the wireless packets transmitted and received by those in the audience. He ‘grabbed’ their Web 2.0 clear text session cookies, and pasted the captured URLs into his browser. According to the report, the cookie eliminates the need for a password. As a vivid demonstration of the dangers, Graham opened his Hamster tool at the end of his talk and very rapidly displayed and cleared - on the conference room’s screen - a Gmail account that someone in the audience had accessed during his talk.
A great demonstration, a scary demonstration, of one of the security problems facing the growth of wireless, cloud computing, mobile personal computing, Web 2.0 communities and all the other services and applications the information society depends upon.
The security problem won’t go away, but with better defensive software, prudent habits, encryption and the like, the risks can be managed.
All we need is a bit of traveling music to get the mobile computing show on the road. How about something from the Black Eyed Peas or Black Sabbath? Maybe the old standard, That Old Black Magic, should be the theme song.
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Our next Connect-World Europe, Middle East & Africa (2007) Issue will be published later this month. The issue will be widely distributed to our reader base and, as well, at shows where we are one of the main media sponsors such as: Carriers World, London, UK, (25-28 September, Victoria Park Plaza, London), Eastern Europe Broadband Convention, (27-29 September, Kiev), Broadband World Forum Europe, Berlin, Germany, (8 -11 October, Berlin, Ukraine) and Broadband Russia, (21-22 November, City: Moscow).

The theme of this issue of Connect-World Europe, Middle East & Africa (2007) will be Access technology trends

Access was once a question of stringing copper - or a string between two paper cups. Wireless access has, in a few years, outpaced wired access so that mobile phones now outnumber all the traditional fixed phones in the world. Today, fibre brings TV, broadband and inexpensive voice. Even power lines are now being used by utilities, or locally at the office, on the factory floor and at home to provide broadband access. Much of the change, the revolution in telecom, is the result of better access technologies. Technologies already in the pipeline, and others on the way, promise to change the way we communicate, work and play to an even greater degree than anything we have seen.

This issue will explore the consequences of these new technologies.