November 23rd, 2009

Google goes all-in with an open source cloud

Posted by Dana Blankenhorn @ 7:13 am

Categories: Cloud Computing, General, Google, Internet, telecom, values

Tags: Google Inc., Open Standard, Open Source, Dana Blankenhorn

Google quietly announced last week that its cloud will run nothing but open source software.

This is a big deal, but let’s first admit why Google did it.

As I have written many times, Google has a big cost advantage when it comes to delivering Internet resources.

It’s like America’s nuclear advantage during the Cold War. Anyone who sought to compete with America in terms like throw-weight would bankrupt themselves. President Reagan encouraged this competition and the Soviet Union bankrupted itself.

So as Google enters the cloud computing wars with outfits like Amazon and Salesforce.com, it is to its advantage that there be no proprietary software advantage. On a level playing field it dominates. They’re the New York Yankees without a salary cap.

Openness, represented by open source and Internet standards, are all to Google’s advantage. This is why opponents of open standards, like Scott Cleland, go to such rhetorical lengths to claim that open standards are, in fact, proprietary. If open standards are proprietary you can set closed standards without harm to the market.

But open standards set terms of competition that advantage the low-cost producer of bits and processing. The question for policymakers, both public and private, is what the terms of competition will be, not who wins.

Cleland and other Bell apologists want their clients to win. Thus they support regulation based on scarcity, under which the winner is the outfit that can hire the most apologists. I own no Google stock, and I make no money from Google. Never have. Probably never will. (If I do I’ll let you know.)

We should set terms of competition that advantage consumers, not particular producers, and that reward plenty rather than scarcity. By that standard Google’s dominance is a fair one, fairly obtained, and so long as it’s not abused it’s a good thing.

In making its cloud open source, Google shows it understands this.

November 23rd, 2009

Tim O'Reilly and the Cassandra act

Posted by Dana Blankenhorn @ 6:38 am

Categories: Apple, General, Google, Internet, Microsoft, business models, content, mass market, telecom

Tags: ESPN, Web, Tim O'Reilly, Threat, News Corp., Mobile Telephony, Internet Service Providers (ISPs), Internet, Channel Management, Marketing

Tim O’Reilly delivered a dire warning at his Web 2.0 Expo over the weekend.

The Web is under threat from closed applications, from Google and Apple to Microsoft and Amazon, and from content vendors like News Corp. building moats and raising high the drawbridges.

I felt great sympathy for Tim, reading his words. I issued similar warnings over the dot-boom, starting from when I launched A-Clue.Com as a weekly newsletter in 1997, having been laid off from CMP’s NetGuide.

Watch out, be wary, I wrote. This Internet commerce thing is just a bubble. It’s going to pop and all will be carnage.

Turns out there is little value in being Cassandra (right, from Wikipedia). When the dot-boom burst, which I date from AOL’s purchase by Time-Warner, it did me no good at all.

I went from having 17 writing gigs to zero. I had joked during the boom that I would gladly write for nothing — in 2002 and 2003 I did. Ha-ha.

The point is that, while I was right, I was powerless to do anything about it.

Tim O’Reilly is not powerless.

And the first thing he needs to do is get straight about the issues.

1. The “threat” from Google and Apple is a feature, not a bug. Mobile telephony has been wholly proprietary from its birth 25 years ago. There is not and never has been a mobile Internet, just whatever data carriers wished to let pass on their networks.
2. It has always been possible to erect paywalls and registration walls. The New England Journal of Medicine and many science journals hide much of their content behind registration. Publishers like England’s The Spectator are constantly trying to get paid.
3. Clouds like those of Amazon and Google may only support software their owners choose to support. Trying to make clouds vanilla discriminates against rocky road and tutti-frutti.

There have been proprietary threats to the Internet practically since the moment the Web was spun. That’s what the browser wars were about. Microsoft was going to add proprietary hooks to Internet Explorer and we’d all be gutted like fish on a line.

Since the Web was spun, there have also been elite audiences, narrow niches for whom payment and registration is a business advantage. Not everyone wants the hoi polloi coming in at all hours so they can spend the next day digging quarters out of the couches. Velvet ropes hold a business model.

So long as I’m not forced to buy News Corp. content, in other words, there is no threat from News Corp. hiding its face from me.

On the other hand, there are real threats O’Reilly didn’t mention. ESPN, for instance.

When ISPs are charged for content, and those ISPs have monopolistic control of their subscribers, that’s a real problem. ESPN has quietly engineered this. Don’t like sports but need a cable modem? You are buying ESPN360 whether you want to or not. Every month some of your ISP bill goes to Disney (ESPN’s owners).

I’m sure News Corp. and every other big content provider would like a taste of that gravy. And it would do little good for subscribers to try and disconnect Comcast en masse — where you gonna go?

It’s the proprietary control of the last mile, and the use of that control to force users into buying things they may not want, that is the big threat to the Internet. That’s a feature of the wireless world, but we can change it. It’s a product of the Bell-cable duopoly, but we can change that, too.

Focus on the real dangers, Tim. You have the power to make change if you focus on what’s real and use your influence.

Otherwise you’re like Holly Hunter in Broadcast News, or hundreds of other working journalists. It must be wonderful to always be right, she’s told.

No, she replies. It’s horrible.

And if you can’t do anything about it, it is.

November 17th, 2009

Five ways Android could get into trouble

Posted by Dana Blankenhorn @ 7:43 am

Categories: General, Google, Hardware, Linux, Linux Handheld, telecom, wireless

Tags: Apple iPhone, Google Inc., Android, Smart Phones, Consumer Electronics, Personal Technology, Dana Blankenhorn

On the surface these are happy days in Android-land.

Going into the key Christmas selling season, Android is eating Windows for lunch. New (non-Google) development centers are continuing to open, new manufacturers are coming on stream.

What could possibly go wrong?

Knowing that rising markets need a wall of worry to keep going up, here are some possibilities:

1. Momentum must be maintained. Once you start gobbling market share you have to keep doing it. Even a slowing of momentum can be read as failure.
2. Developers must be kept happy. Some are complaining they’re working full-time getting apps written for the Android operating system running on multiple phones.
3. The Android app store has some catching-up to do, especially in the user experience area.
4. When will Android get a “killer app” that the iPhone can’t match, or one it hasn’t already matched?
5. Can Google ride herd on its complex ecosystem? Everyone knows who the boss is with the iPhone. Not so with Android. (UPDATE: Rich Sands writes to say this article from his site is more to the point.)

We shouldn’t get too excited about Android’s early success. A 3.5% market share is still a gnat on Apple’s elephant. Early buzz does not make for victory — as President Howard Dean will tell you. (Or President Huckabee, if you prefer.)

Google has set itself a more complex task than that which faced Apple when it introduced the iPhone a few years ago. Google is using an open source approach, which means there are more hands on the steering wheel. And Google is trying to overcome an established leader, leading to charges of me-tooism.

A good start is not the race.

November 13th, 2009

The stupid network will get a hearing

Posted by Dana Blankenhorn @ 7:07 am

Categories: Freedom2Connect, General, Government, Infrastructure, Internet, LANs and WANs, telecom

Tags: Network, Networking, Dana Blankenhorn

Advocates of transforming network regulation from Bell services to dumb bits will get a hearing from the FCC, as David Isenberg, author of the classic Rise of the Stupid Network, has joined the agency as an expert advisor.

(Picture taken in 2004 from Isenberg’s Isen.com Web site.)

Isenberg will be part of the team that will deliver the National Broadband Plan to Congress in February. He wrote on his blog that, as a result of his agency assignment his annual conference on broadband reform, Freedom2Connect, will be postponed.

A bit of disclosure. I covered the 2006 Freedom2Connect conference in Washington for ZDNet.

In the Stupid Network essay, which he wrote while at AT&T in 1997, Isenberg argued that the most efficient network is controlled at the edge, with a design based on the idea of plenty rather than scarcity, and transport based on the needs of the data.

The idea, he wrote, was that the network did not need intelligence at the center, that it should just “deliver the bits, stupid.” Hence the stupid network.

The problem is that while the stupid network is fine engineering, great for users and consumer equipment suppliers, it doesn’t leave much for the telephone company to do but move bits. And Isenberg wrote at a time when the bit-moving market was highly competitive, with prices falling every few months.

Thus the phone companies have argued against the stupid network. They have sought to install gear within the parts of the Internet they control to guarantee Quality of Service, to distinguish between bits based on protocol or what the customer is paying to move them, and to stop bad bits before they arrive at a user’s desk.

“Those are nice bits there, a shame if something happened to them.” And the phone company is Santa Claus, deciding which bits are naughty and which are nice.

The problem with this is it slows the network, and creates a barrier to entry for innovation, which must win permission from the network operator in order to reach the market. It is also redundant if customer equipment can handle tasks previously done by the intelligent network.

The Internet, as it exists today, is essentially a stupid network.

Cellular networks, you will note, are completely different from stupid networks. Such networks are all centrally controlled, with the carrier defining different bits as separate services, controlling who can sell what, and taking a cut on every transaction.

Isenberg left AT&T in 1998 as “Distinguished Member of the Technical Staff” but has been better known as mud, Voldemort and Who’s He at Bell offices ever since. (This is especially true for those who work as Bell lobbyists.)

Isenberg will just be one member of the agency’s National Broadband Task Force, one voice out of many. The FCC is also taking public comment online and holding hearings.

But at least his voice will be heard.

November 12th, 2009

Broadcom goes open source and hell freezes over

Posted by Dana Blankenhorn @ 5:22 am

Categories: GPL, General, Hardware, Linux, Linux Handheld, Strategy, VOIP, mobile, telecom, wireless

Tags: Broadcom Corp., Linux, Branding, Open Source, Sales Strategy, Operating Systems, Software, Marketing, Sales, Dana Blankenhorn

When the rock group Eagles broke up in 1980 they said they would get back together “when hell froze over.” They did get back together, in 1994. The album was called Hell Freezes Over.

Point is you can promise you will never do something — never, ever, ever — but business is business.

It’s with this in mind we find Broadcom making its BroadVoice voice codecs open source and royalty free under GPL V. 2.

GigaOM is wondering whether Broadcom isn’t just pushing for higher priced, higher quality voice from service providers using the codecs. I have another theory.

Broadcom saw its greatest success in pioneering relationships with Taiwanese OEMs. When other chip companies were offering these firms software and ecosystems, Broadcom offered them solutions, complete designs from brand names they could bang out for a quick profit.

What I saw at CompuTex this year was an enormous interest from these OEMs, whose ties to Chinese manufacturing are incredibly strong, to go “up the stack” of value, to own their own designs and create their own brand names.

They see this as an impossible dream on the desktop, but very possible in the handset business, a Broadcom niche. Systems like Android, LiMo and Symbian are open source, so the components going into them should also be open source. It’s the most effective way to compete with Apple.

In taking this route, the OEMs are explicitly rejecting Microsoft’s Windows Mobile, and this is a very big deal. This has nothing to do with the sales world they desire. They gave Microsoft all of the Netbook market and stuck Linux in a corner.

This Broadcom announcement is the best proof yet that the future of the handheld market is Linux.

November 3rd, 2009

Skype plays footsie with open source

Posted by Dana Blankenhorn @ 6:05 am

Categories: Applications, Distributions, General, Infrastructure, Internet, VOIP, telecom, wireless

Tags: Skype Technologies S.A., Linux, Open Source, Operating Systems, Software, Dana Blankenhorn

As I wrote earlier today, when something goes open source we should ask how.

So in contrast with Yahoo’s open sourcing of Traffic Server, let’s talk about Skype’s “open source” move.

Yahoo was trying to build value from community. Skype is trying an embrace and extend strategy like that of Blackboard.

To its credit Skype is being frank on that.

Yes, there’s an open source version of Linux client being developed. This will be a part of larger offering, but we can’t tell you much more about that right now. Having an open source UI will help us get adopted in the “multicultural” land of Linux distributions, as well as on other platforms and will speed up further development. We will update you once more details are available.

It’s a half-cheer for open source.

All Skype really plans to open source is a Linux version of its client. The protocol remains proprietary. So if you have a Linux phone (Moblin, Android, etc.) and want to support Skype’s proprietary protocol on your new hardware, you can.

This is the first technology move by Skype since eBay sold it to private investors for $2 billion , followed by assorted legal shenanigans. Everyone involved in that deal wants to protect that value.

But telephony is a low-bandwidth application. Its value going forward shouldn’t be voice as-such, but the integration of voice with other computer applications. In that world being wholly proprietary is a disadvantage. But opening up completely may be seen as giving away the goose that lays golden eggs.

Skype is caught east of the rock and west of the hard place. It knows it needs an open source strategy, but it fears giving itself away.

My view is this is not going to end well.

October 29th, 2009

Qualcomm joins open source movement at head of parade

Posted by Dana Blankenhorn @ 7:38 am

Categories: Development, General, Hardware, Linux Handheld, Linux Laptop, mass market, mobile, telecom, wireless

Tags: Open Source Movement, Qualcomm Inc., Matt Asay, Open Source, Dana Blankenhorn

Qualcomm, which has long had a major position in mobile chip sets and standards, has joined the open source movement with an eye to leading it. (Picture from Whenpigsfly.info.)

The company formed a new unit called Qualcomm Innovation Center (QuIC), under a senior vice president, and it joined the board of directors of the Symbian Foundation.

The idea behind the QuIC is to push open source, including systems like Chrome, Webkit and Android as well as Symbian, the company said.

Qualcomm is doing this to support its Snapdragon chip set, a CPU and graphics chip package designed for low power and handheld devices, most based on Linux. These include what Qualcomm calls “smartbooks,” netbook-phone hybrids on which Chinese manufacturers like Acer, Asus and HTC are already working.

The move should also be seen in light of recent moves by Intel to support mobile open source. Matt Asay writes that “pigs are beginning to fly” and he’s right.

But where are they heading?

The efforts of Qualcomm surrounding Snapdragon seem to prove that the “waiting for Godot” story of “desktop Linux” may finally get an appearance by its title character appearing on the stage in the form of a telephone-laptop hybrid.

But open source advocates should also take a jaundiced view of this, not just because it has been delayed for years. As Matt notes, combining open source and proprietary technology in the way Qualcomm wants to do, while legitimate, does threaten to maintain the vendor lock-in that open source is meant to fight.

Just because you draw a picture does not mean the pig is really flying.

October 23rd, 2009

Bells give net neutrality the McCain two-step

Posted by Dana Blankenhorn @ 8:52 am

Categories: General, Government, Internet, Legal, politics, telecom

Tags: Net Neutrality, Dana Blankenhorn

For over a century the Bells have been masters of the bureaucratic game.

Their failure in the Bell break-up, which delivered huge profits to investors, only taught them to fight harder. So after putting themselves together like the broom in “The Sorcerer’s Apprentice,” of course they’re going to fight net neutrality like their lives depend on it.

Despite a unanimous FCC vote to start writing net neutrality rules, then, don’t expect an easy victory.

Democrats passed an actual law to rein-in the Bells in 1996, but the Bells finally won that battle, and $200 billion spent to upgrade America’s broadband went instead into Bell pockets. A unanimous FCC looks small by comparison.

Here’s how the two-step works. If the regulators say no you go to Congress. If Congress says no you go to the courts. If the courts say no you go to the states. If the states say no you go to the regulators.(Gee, golly, Officer Krupke.)

Meanwhile you hire every lobbyist you can, create every Astroturf organization you can so it appears your self-interest is the public interest, and contribute heavily to any politician, on any level, who will toe the company line.

Take John McCain (above). He says it’s all “mavericky” to stop net neutrality in Congress. Nothing mavericky going on at all.

McCain was one of five Senators who voted against the 1996 Telecommunications Act, and chairman of the Senate Commerce Committee in 2003-04, when the Bells were consolidating into two companies owning local, long distance, core Internet, and wireless duopolies nationwide. What he called “deregulation” was, and is, monopoly.

As with maverick, deregulation is a brand. It’s just the name of the ranch. The cow’s still going to the slaughterhouse, not Wyoming.

This is actually a bipartisan rant. There are plenty of Democrats, at all levels, bought and paid for by the Bells. Do not listen to what politicians say. Watch what they do and follow the money.

Any form of net neutrality, wireless or wireline, remains an uphill battle.

October 15th, 2009

Should Google spin Android into a foundation?

Posted by Dana Blankenhorn @ 7:29 am

Categories: Development, General, Google, Hardware, Linux Handheld, Standards, management, support, telecom, wireless

Tags: Google Inc., Fork, Foundation, Eclipse, Linux Foundation, Forks, Linux, Java Development Tools, Open Source, Operating Systems

Google faces a conundrum.

How does it maintain control of Android and at the same time build a community of interests in which developers can seek profit?

The easy answer is to turn the Open Handset Alliance into the Android Foundation. (Fans of the late Isaac Asimov will recognize this fellow even in French.)

Critics love to claim that Eclipse is just an IBM front, but that’s a cheap shot, based on the fact that IBM gains huge benefits from Eclipse without having to pay all the bills there.

Foundations can be a great way to organize vendors who have a common purpose but divergent business plans. The Linux Foundation is a good example of this.

But there are risks in an Android Foundation, as Symbian’s David Wood said when they were going open source a year ago.

Forks are one.

Foundations lead naturally to forks. Every vendor who sells an “enhanced” version of Eclipse tools is pushing a proprietary fork. There are dozens of Linux distros, each of which forks the code in some way to provide added value.

How much Android forking can Google stand before the value starts dribbling through its fingers? Like to see some stuck-up Microsoft search engine sitting on an Android phone? (Make your blood boil? Well I should say.)

There is, of course, another risk in going the Foundation route. It doesn’t always work. Witness LiMo, which Motorola recently abandoned for Android. Witness Moblin, which Intel gave to the Linux Foundation. Witness Symbian itself for that matter.

The difference between the OHA and a conventional software foundation is that for Android to move forward it must first be expressed in phones, in hardware. The chicken-and-egg question here yields an easy answer. It’s the chicken. An egg, the software, is pretty meaningless if it’s just sitting on a server.

This fact reduces the threat of a fork. The value of any Android handset lies in its compatibility. Without that it might as well be a Windows Mobile set.

So long as Google is the biggest investor in Android, then, it’s probably doing the right thing by avoiding the foundation model. But at some point the rest of the ecosystem needs to grow up for Google to get its investment back.

So if Google does set up an Android Foundation some time down the road, know that it’s a sign of success, and that it no longer has to push this rock up the hill all by itself.

September 21st, 2009

Will the open Internet become a partisan divide

Posted by Dana Blankenhorn @ 8:58 am

Categories: Applications, General, Government, Infrastructure, Internet, LANs and WANs, Legal, Network Administration, Network Standards/Protocols, mass market, politics, telecom

Tags: Net Neutrality, Internet, Dana Blankenhorn

The idea of an open and neutral Internet is about to become a political flash point.

The launch of a new site dedicated to the issue, OpenInternet.gov (above) was accompanied by FCC chair Julius Genachowski publishing his speech text at The Washington Post and a brief commentary based on it at The Huffington Post, a liberal site.

The regulatory regime he proposed is along the lines of a net neutrality bill offered by Democrats that got a hearing in the House last week. The agency and the House agree on their aims, the main differences being how and where the details will be fleshed out.

Meanwhile, The Wall Street Journal, which hosted policy pronouncements from top regulators throughout the Bush Administration, ran a piece about Genachowski’s moves that was highly skeptical of both their rationale and their legality.

It said Republicans will oppose Genachowski on “free enterprise” grounds, and pointed to a suit by Comcast against previous attempts to impose a set of net neutrality rules.

At the same time the two Republican members of the FCC said they opposed any net neutrality for wireless, and support exclusive deals between equipment makers and networks like the AT&T-iPhone deal.

Add a little industry Astroturf and a plan depressingly like that in health care starts to become visible. Turn some insiders with industry money, work from the outside on ideological grounds, and the 2008 election need never have happened. Plus you can blame the Democrats if they fail to crush you — call them partisan and ideological.

My view remains that net neutrality would not be necessary in an environment where there is ample competition. If someone wants an ISP or cell operator that will block everything to the left of Fox News they should have it, so long as the market offers ample alternatives.

Unfortunately antitrust does not appear to be the ground the Obama Administration seems ready to stand on. Which could make the open Internet a partisan divide for years to come.

September 10th, 2009

Could One Laptop Per Child be a bad thing?

Posted by Dana Blankenhorn @ 6:08 am

Categories: General, Hardware, Internet, education, mass market, support, telecom

Tags: Child, Laptop Computer, One Laptop Per Child Project, Pastorius, Client Hardware, Productivity, Notebooks, Hardware, Notebooks & Tablets, Dana Blankenhorn

You know the old saw about helping people rise from poverty? Give a man a fish and he eats for a day. Teach a man to fish and he eats for a lifetime — or until the fish run out.

The idea of One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) is to teach a child to fish. But is it really more like giving a child a fishing pole?

It’s true the man who offered this criticism, Tom Pastorius of Projects Abroad, is selling something. Volunteering. He is the exclusive agent of the UK-based volunteering group for the U.S. and Canada.

He says volunteers should be there to help kids who get laptops, ideally at a community computer cluster rather than leaving each child to their own devices. This reduces the child’s frustration, without hindering the learning process.

Fair enough. One volunteer per child sounds better than one laptop. But it’s not going to happen. So that means we go back to the idea of computer labs, with the hardware locked away at night to keep it safe?

Pastorius’ concept also flies in the face of recent trends in Australia, where as we noted earlier students in New South Wales all got laptops to start the year. Windows laptops.

How long do you think those will last, with their hard drives and optical drives and what are the odds the kid’s going to update their antiviral each day? How about one computer repairman per child?

Which leads to my own modest proposal. Client hardware is not the problem. OLPC has proven that hardware can be super-cheap. Taiwanese Netbook makers have taken that idea and run with it.

The real problem is connectivity. Would our aid money, and the work of volunteers, be better spent upgrading the bandwidth available to villages in the developing world? One WiFi per child.

Or perhaps one pigeon?

August 14th, 2009

Will mobile Linux distros hang separately?

Posted by Dana Blankenhorn @ 6:36 am

Categories: General, Hardware, Linux, Linux Handheld, mass market, mobile, telecom, wireless

Tags: Job, Phone, Mobile, Mobile Linux, Linux, UNIX, Operating Systems, Telecom & Utilities, Mobile Applications, Open Source

HTC has had its Android phone out for months now, and there’s great excitement over the coming kit from Motorola.

Panasonic and NEC are out with new LiMo gear. Intel and Novell are both pushing the Moblin platform. Nokia is pushing Linux in the new Maemo phones.

But what are the chances you will be able to move software among these various phones? (Tux is holding a Treo in this picture from Palminfocenter.com.)

I am not a programmer. The job may be trivial. But until we know what is involved in doing the job the job cannot be done. And right now we don’t know what will be necessary.

The question for this weekend is, are these mobile Linux vendors making a big mistake by not collaborating more? Apple is still killing them, developer attention is not unlimited, Microsoft hearts developers, and Palm is still in the game.

Even taken together, the market share of all these Linux phones by the end of next year may be trivial next to what is being piled up by the competition. But these Linux phones can’t be taken together. They are all tied to different distributions. They all stand alone.

This is just what happened with Unix back in the day. The software was great, but each vendor had their own way of doing things, so the market never really developed. Unix did not hang together and so each vendor hung separately.

Is this about to happen with mobile Linux?

August 3rd, 2009

What the FCC can do for open spectrum

Posted by Dana Blankenhorn @ 7:21 am

Categories: Apple, General, Google, Government, Infrastructure, Internet, Legal, Strategy, mass market, mobile, politics, telecom, wireless

Tags: FCC, Phone, Spectrum, Federal Government, Telecom & Utilities, Government, Dana Blankenhorn

Larry Dignan is afraid the FCC may be doing too much, just looking at possibly anti-competitive deals, trying to stay on top of the news instead of sleeping in a corner, as it did for a decade before Julius Genachowski (right) came to town.

It’s a mark of just how knee-jerk the opposition to government action in markets has become, that a mere investigation can lead reporters to fingering their worry beads.

To most people it’s pretty obvious why Apple shut down Google Voice. VOIP is competition with cellular minutes, just as it was competition for wired phone minutes, which it destroyed.

I’m old enough to remember the monthly chore of auditing my phone bill each month, creating expense bills for various publishers, with the cost of each call written down and photocopied. I don’t do that any more. The cost is rolled into my cellular plan as minutes which neither I nor my publisher has to see.

But running phone calls — a low bandwidth service — over the Internet rather than the wireless network is still a cost savings, which some customers would like to capture. Only the cell phone companies don’t want them to.

This is just one of many ways in which companies have succeeded in frustrating Moore’s Law over this decade. There is no technical reason why the price to move bits should not be going down, going down constantly, and going down rapidly. The cost of equipment, the efficiency of technology, it’s all there to make it happen.

What isn’t there are competitive markets with incentives for investment and no tolerance for monopoly.

Politics has squandered the advances of Moore’s Law, and it will take more than the FCC’s meager politics to bring them back.

So let me offer a simple guideline. Call it Dana’s Law of Technology Regulation:

Regulation should conform to the trends of Moore’s Law and maintain maximum competition in the market.

It will take real changes, not just investigations, to make that happen. We need more unlicensed channels, we need wholesaling in the last mile.

Bits may not be free, but they should be as cheap as the technology creating them allows. The goal should be encouraging the market to expand opportunity, and not making anyone’s life easier.

June 22nd, 2009

Creative destruction in Canada

Posted by Dana Blankenhorn @ 7:50 am

Categories: General, Government, Hardware, mergers & acquisitions, telecom

Tags: Siemens AG, Nortel Networks Corp., Canada, Internet, Telephony, Telecom & Utilities, Networking, Telecommunications, Dana Blankenhorn

The creative destruction fostered by the Internet and open source struck Canada hard over the weekend.

Nortel, once one of the Big Three in telecom equipment (Lucent, now part of Alcatel and Siemens were the others) is being broken up for pennies on the dollar. Its stock is now officially worthless.

The end became obvious this weekend in the $650 million sale of its CDMA wireless unit, ironically to a joint venture of Siemens and Nokia. (Their new parent is trying to reassure Nortel LTE employees with an open letter today.)

To anyone whom, like me, went to a Supercomm in the mid-1990s the fall is humbling. But it was both inevitable and necessary.

Inevitable because Nortel, like Siemens and Lucent (the Bell equipment arm before being renamed and spun-out), made most of its money on huge switches for analog phone service, mostly to a small group of carriers.

The Internet killed that business. Voice is a low-bandwidth application.

Even had Nortel seen the handwriting on the wall and moved into the data networking area dominated now by Cisco, it would have quickly faced both the Chinese giant Huawei and open source outfits like Vyatta, killing its margins.

The necessity still has fall-out in Canada’s loss of international business prestige. It reminds me a bit of what happened to Texas banking in the 1980s, when the state’s biggest banks were all sold to competitors in New York, California and North Carolina.

Back then there was a great feeling of loss, a fear the state was losing its autonomy and its economic center. Canadians may feel that way today.

But Texas came back. That’s the point. Canada is much better off nurturing entrepreneurs than trying to bail out the past.

May 21st, 2009

VOIP reaches end of its proprietary era

Posted by Dana Blankenhorn @ 8:58 am

Categories: Applications, General, Internet, business models, telecom

Tags: Network, Business Model, Skype Technologies S.A., Incumbent Wireline Company, Telephony, VOIP, Telecommunications, Telecom & Utilities, Networking, Dana Blankenhorn

News that Skype will go into a new open source FreeSwitch should mark the end of the proprietary era in Voice Over IP, and of telephony in general.

I was never wildly impressed with VOIP. Telephony is a low bandwidth application, in the eyes of the Internet. But it was the only application for the old switched telephone network on which today’s Internet rides.

The idea of VOIP was to bypass the old network and move calls to the new network, which had a different business model. By pricing calls as bits, rather than as a defined service, VOIP saved money for people and helped destroy the old phone network business model.

Since then that business model has fallen. I no longer log long distance calls, or worry which side of a call is being charged. I pay a monthly fee for my mobile service, with plenty of “minutes” so that it’s not an issue. So do most people.

When VOIP was new the proprietary nature of Skype made sense. It helped VOIP live in a proprietary, regulated world.

But that world is fast disappearing. Incumbent wireline companies are like newspaper monopolies — that’s why Verizon is selling lines to Frontier as fast as Frontier will buy them. Most stock analysts consider its FIOS plan a market failure.

The creative destruction that Skype began has now reached the point where it is eating its creator. This was inevitable. It is not a cause for sorrow, but for celebration.

Telephony is finally, and forever free.

May 18th, 2009

Linux and the channel

Posted by Dana Blankenhorn @ 10:59 am

Categories: General, Hardware, Linux Laptop, Microsoft, business models, mass market, mobile, telecom, wireless

Tags: Linux Laptop, Phone, Microsoft Corp., Laptop Computer, Netbook, Carrier, Linux Pundit Bill Weinberg, Linux, UNIX, Operating Systems

Linux Pundit Bill Weinberg has produced two posts this weekend asking why we don’t have Linux laptops, what I would call Netbooks running Linux.

His answers are conventional. Microsoft price cuts. Ubuntu looked less than impressive. Maybe it will go from the phone up rather than the desk down, he concludes.

The answer, I’ve found, comes down to one of the first terms I learned when I joined the computer press, over 25 years ago.

The channel.

We think of stores as being the home of demand. They are not. They are where demand is satisfied.

The home of demand lies on the other end of the telescope. It lies in the marketing collateral, the co-op dollars, and the mass advertising strategies of manufacturers.

In PC manufacturing there is only one name that counts. Microsoft. Everyone else is an OEM.

Everyone suffers from this.

I tried out some Linux laptops last year and, while there were some glitches they held promise. But when it came time for me to lay down cash, there was no Linux kit on the shelves.

What I learned from a month owning a Microsoft Netbook is that I wish I had a choice. Despite a lack of moving parts, my HP Netbook is a battery hog. I could get 10 hours with a Linux laptop. The same box running Microsoft runs for fewer than three.

There’s more. My Linux laptop booted almost instantly. This Microsoft monster takes two minutes to get there.

Want to talk cost of ownership? You have no choice with Windows but to load the thing up with anti-virals and registry cleaners. They all have to load before you can do any work.

And then there’s the cost of time. They all have to check things out for you. Any nasties out there — any updates? Come back when we’re done, junior — get a cup of coffee or something.

When I get back from China, I’m erasing the 8 GByte stick memory “hard drive” on my HP Netbook and starting over.

All this changes when you move from the phone down. There you find there is a different manufacturer. Your mobile phone carrier. And everyone else is an OEM.

Who do you hate more, Microsoft or the phone company? Because those are your choices. Even Apple must, in some ways, dance to the tune of the carriers. There is no free market for phone tech — just a carrier oligopoly.

In mobile devices carriers control the channel.

We can cry about that if we want, but that’s the reality. And this gives Linux its opportunity. Because carriers don’t want the headaches of Microsoft any more than we do. Since they create the demand, they get to decide.

By handing the design job off to variations on a Linux distro — LiMo, QT, Android — carriers get flexibility with no loss of control. It’s still true that nothing gets on their network without approval, but in their world Microsoft becomes just another OEM, like Apple for AT&T.

So is Bill right? Will the Linux laptop fit within the palm of your hand?

Maybe. But so long as carriers control the channel it won’t be Linux as you know it. It will be Linux as they want it.

May 15th, 2009

Who will pay to fix the Internet's Interstates?

Posted by Dana Blankenhorn @ 8:23 am

Categories: Cloud Computing, General, Google, Infrastructure, Internet, telecom

Tags: Google Inc., Service, Fiber, Sources, Internet, Software As A Service (SaaS), Network Technology, Emerging Technologies, Networking, Dana Blankenhorn

Google has taken the hit for yesterday’s Googlesplat. (Picture from the National Institutes of Standards and Technology.)

“Sherlock” Dignan had earlier fingered AT&T, which along with Verizon’s MCI carries most of the Internet core’s traffic. AT&T insists it’s entirely a Googlefail.

Sources are telling our Sam Diaz that this has a lot of people rethinking their cloud strategies. SaaS planning will also take a hit.

Google planned for its growth carefully, and probably has more inter-city fiber capacity than any other IP service out there, more than some big ISPs.

Most of us are not so independent of the core. Google’s problems are also proof that, even if you build independence into your business strategy, you can still run into problems.

Core Internet services, most delivered over fiber cable and optical switches, are the Interstate highway of today’s Internet. Thanks to what I call Moore’s Law of Fiber (and technical types call wavelength division multiplexing), the cost to move these bits keeps declining.  

But this transport remains an essential service, and with prices continually dropping this service is in fewer-and-fewer hands. Profitability is also low, especially compared to licensed cellular, where service providers gain control of the content they transfer.

Right now core services are at the heart of their useful life. Costs of current deployments are bound to rise as systems age — that’s why the old bathtub curve tops this post.

We are heading for a crisis, and if this little outage wakes us up to that fact it’s a very good thing.

Everything we do online — downloading open source, running SaaS services, clouds, or simply reading this page — depends on core services, which have become an essential utility.

Those services need to be redundant, they need to keep scaling, and they thus will need continuing investment. Just like the Interstate system.

Now there are two ways to fix the Interstates. We can share the cost and treat them as public utilities. Or we can sell them off as toll roads and pay for them as they’re used, along with ample profit to the operator.

There is a lot of debate right now over whether the Interstates should become toll roads, but it’s important to note that core Internet services already are. That model generally works well, today.

But for how long?

May 12th, 2009

oFono is Intel hail mary play in mobility

Posted by Dana Blankenhorn @ 6:58 am

Categories: Development, Distributions, General, Hardware, Implementations, Strategy, mobile, telecom, wireless

Tags: Telephony, Nokia Corp., Mobility, Intel Corp., oFono, VOIP, Telecom & Utilities, Telecommunications, Wireless And Mobility, Networking

Those seeking to hit Intel with antitrust charges conveniently ignore there are huge and growing markets where it remains a bit player.

Mobility is one of them.

Now the company is trying one more time with oFono, an attempt by both it and longtime market leader Nokia to remain relevant on a playing field now dominated by Apple and Google’s Android.

More than just another high-tech misspelling, oFono seeks to define a new mobile stack which, while efficient, also limits the technologies that can be layered on top of it. (Get a bigger copy of the illustration above at the oFono Web site.)

From the announcement post of Marcel Holtmann, from the Intel Open Source Technology Center:

oFono is licensed under GPLv2, and it includes a high-level D-Bus API for use by telephony applications of any license. oFono also includes a low-level plug-in API for integrating with Open Source as well as third party telephony stacks, cellular modems and storage back-ends. The plug-in API functionality is modeled on public standards, in particular 3GPP TS 27.007 “AT command set for User Equipment (UE).”

Sounds pretty open source-y, no? Sounds more open source-y than thou.

But if Intel and Nokia are defining what goes in the center of the stack, it’s a real hardware power play.

I may well be wrong, but I suspect the lower levels of the smartphone stack have already been spoken for. Bringing out a new one, even one built at the lowest level of the open source incline, may no longer be enough to win out over Intel’s and Nokia’s rivals.

It may be, as Barney Frank once observed, “the biggest hail mary play in the history of football. Or marys.”

But as a lover of competition I would be delighted to be proven wrong.

May 8th, 2009

The fundamental value of Internet access

Posted by Dana Blankenhorn @ 7:21 am

Categories: General, Government, Internet, mass market, politics, telecom, values

Tags: Internet Access, Constitution, Dana Blankenhorn

Is Internet access more like cable television or a telephone?

In other words, is it a luxury or should it be a right? (Pictured, the new Cooper River Bridge in Charleston.)

Matt Asay holds to the former view. He doesn’t want to see Internet access defined as a fundamental right.

I agree, but for a different reason.

Fundamental rights can be taken away. Anyone who has been tortured, or had their free speech rights abridged, knows there is nothing really fundamental about rights other than our common agreement to respect them.

My Congressman is John Lewis. When he was a child, in Alabama, during the days of segregation, he had no rights. He had to demand them, march for them, get beaten bloody for them.

The Constitution is just words, the Bill of Rights just words. They can be ignored or abridged with a simple memo.

Internet access, then, is more fundamental than rights. It is an economic necessity.

People with no Internet connection, by definition, have less economic power in the 21st century than other people. They have less access to training, no way to see over the horizon (which is why TV has become so trivial). Their connections to the world are entirely local, except for those few people they maintain contact with by telephone or mail.

I’m old enough to remember a world before the Web was spun, when Internet access was an elite activity. I am returning to those heady days next month, when I visit my friends in Japan.

My last journey there was in 1989. I went there to cover a conference with the Electronic Networking Association, an early group of online advocates.

While there I wrote a few stories for Newsbytes, the online news service I was then employed by. On a trade show floor I found a phone line, connected my laptop modem to it, and bounced my stories to an editor in London, for forwarding to the publisher in San Francisco.

Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, and even 20 years ago this kind of casual access to online resources was considered somewhat magical.

Today my kids take this kind of thing for granted. Neither can remember a time before the Internet. My daughter assumes she can download detailed directions to a likely college. My son assumes he can discuss computer games and culture with friends around the world.

Internet access, in other words, is fundamental to my childrens’ interactions with the world. It defines their economic utility, their ability to learn, even many of their social relationships.

Enabling that, or disabling that, is not a question of “rights,” but it is fundamental.

It is fundamental to our future as a nation that everyone have the best possible access to this resource. Just as it’s fundamental they have a way to get around on our road system.

You don’t have a “right” to drive but we know that if you can’t you are handicapped. Those who can’t drive and don’t live near public transportation are economically isolated, unable to get to work, to school, or to shop.

Unless, of course, they have Internet access, which offers all those things. The better the access, the better for everyone.

The Internet, in other words, is the real bridge to the 21st century, and those without it can’t cross. It’s not a fundamental right, but it is fundamental.

April 27th, 2009

Samsung asks if i7500 is the Android you have been looking for

Posted by Dana Blankenhorn @ 7:57 am

Categories: General, Google, Hardware, Linux Handheld, mass market, mobile, telecom

Tags: Google Android, Samsung Electronics Co. Ltd., Camera, Netbooks, Nettops & MIDs, GPS, Hardware, Consumer Electronics, Personal Technology, Dana Blankenhorn

Samsung is releasing its first phone using Google’s Android software, the i7500 (right, from our Crave blog).

Is this the Android you have been looking for?

Andrew Nusca at the Toybox notes that it has a real touch screen, built-in GPS, WiFi support, a 5 GByte Megapixel camera and up to 40 Gbyte of memory when you add a MicroSD card.

Our British unit notes the phone will be released in Germany through O2. No pricing has been announced.

Personally I would love one of these babies for my trip to CompuTex, especially since the camera is said to be self-focusing.

Pictures would be easy to transfer to the blog since I already have the GIMP ediing software loaded and could move the photos directly to my new Netbook on the SD card.

Of course, I can do that already with my present camera set-up, which is about a year old. But the GPS would be cool if I got lost somewhere in Asia.

The big news is that even if this is not the Android you are looking for another will be along presently. Sony Ericsson, Motorola and Acer have all said they are working on Android kit. Samsung is just the second manufacturer with product, following HTC of Taiwan.

This is supposed to mean very active competition but also a single cooperative community of users. It’s the construction of the community, not the App store, that gives Android its potential punch.

And then when you consider that Netbooks running Android could be announced as early as CompuTex in June, and delivered to U.S. buyers in time for Christmas, that could really be starting something.