In Today’s Issue: Motorola gossip: the demerger cometh; cablecos’ Comcast-Clearwire concert party; HOWTO deploy fibre in NZ?; here’s an answer from San Francisco; Symbian OS platform security is hacked; free WLAN in BA lounges; 3UK is profitable, pigs fly; another MVNO casualty; Virgin Mobile India “not an MVNO”; Miss Bimbo; $20 a month on ringtones; Cuba Movil!; Chinese 3G; really fast stuff; 3G iPhones; another startup-without-money.

Inside gossip at Motorola; someone claims to have been the Richard Kinder figure of their crisis and accuses Ed Zander of working their past CMO to death, and also playing too much golf. Which of these sins is more serious is left as an exercise for the reader. It was also this week that saw Moto finally take our repeated advice. They got rid of the handsets operation, thus leaving it “floating downwards to find its own level”, in the immortal words of Sir Norman Fowler describing the collapse of Sterling.

Continue reading "Ring! Ring! Hot News, 31st March 2008" »

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In Today’s Issue: 37% of Ultra-Mobile PCs to get WiMAX; Virtual PBXs could eat your business customers; low-cost telepresence like low-cost spaceflight, i.e. not very; MSFT buys callcentreco; Don Price on managed services; topology aware P2P; variable speed limits for the Net; price war rages; i-mode fails in Europe; huge telcos win huge telco auction; epic Aussie brawl over WiMAX; Sprint’s new core network - platform perfection or IMS infection?; Vodafone & MTN; French FTTH; Deutsche Telekom disaster; sickening “human skin” phones.

37% of ultra-mobile devices to fit WiMAX. So says Intel — but then again, how big will the market for ultra-mobile PCs really be? Time will tell…

Continue reading "Ring! Ring! Hot News, 25th March 2008" »

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As described in an article in November the work of the TM Forum is becoming more and more important to the development of new telecoms business models.

It’s been trying to simplify the interactions between telcos for years by standardising their OSS-BSS interfaces; if the Telco 2.0 vision comes to pass, what with all those third-party innovators, payments going upstream and downstream, and user data flowing through dozens of APIs, we’re really going to need answers to a whole world of questions around OSS-BSS, roaming, interconnection, and settlement. After all, arbitrarily large numbers of small services (either on their own or as part of bigger organisations) will be busy interacting with telco networks, and the complex of telco, third party developer and customers will be interacting with other telcos, other systems, and other businesses; we’d better have these things nailed down.

As a prelude to their important Management World event on 18-22 May in Nice, we spoke to Keith Willetts, their Chairman (and one of the nicest men in telecoms), about convergence, trends in OSS/BSS and data mining - critical issues, as was re-iterated at the CMO Forum at the Mobile World Congress:

Continue reading "Interview: TM Forum's Chairman, Keith Willetts" »

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Telco 2.0 is all about new business models telcos need in order to survive the crashing price of their staple product, voice. We reckon that addressing entirely different markets and needs — in particular the two-sided business model — is the answer. But sometimes it’s hard to explain this; so we came up with a new framework for it. So we’re going to try to work out what, precisely, goes into one of these “platforms” we keep talking about, how much of it there is, and eventually, how much it will cost.

To start, remember there are two things that go to make up this model: 1.) the ability for partners to re-package distribution assets (broadband networks, voice networks, etc.) independent of the telco’s own retail efforts, via rich new wholesale products; and 2.) B2B value-added services you build on top that use telco network and customer data assets to support largely non-telco business processes. In this article we’re just talking about the great big transaction platform that support the latter of these.

We assume the underlying infrastructure gets “Openreached” (for the access loops) or “Level(3)’d” (for the backbone). In other words, physical access ultimately becomes part of a multi-utility company, based off a model more like that for estate management, with 30+ year investment horizons and stable annunity rents. The core belongs to specialist wholesalers who thrive on volume. Also let’s assume telcos remain weak at feature-based product development (which seems fair). So, what is left? Quite a lot. But surely it’s now useless shorn of being an end-user services innovator? Absolutely not.

The remaining telco assets are capable of answering seven very important questions:

1. Who are you? We’re talking authentication and identity here, based on the verified billing records in the BSS and OSS, plus security assets such as the SIM.
2. Where are you? Mobile operators especially have a huge resource of information about location.
3. How are you? We already see some rich presence-and-availability services, though driven by a desperate bid to compete with Web 2.0 apps. Some instant messaging addicts (think of it as “digital chocolate”) spend a surprising amount of time updating avatars and mood messages to reflect their emotional state, not just doing one-to-one messaging. Capture these behaviours and you will create major opportunities in anything that involves changes of status. Presence is to time as cell-site location and GPS are to space — we just need to figure out the business model still.
4. Do you have credit? All the data by-products of billing; telcos can make your application aware of money. The Internet can route packets, but not payments.
5. How can we reach you? Operators not only can reach you via their own communications services, but often can associate together multiple addresses or identifiers.
6. Who do you know? No-one has more social graph data than a telco. Users have invested their most previous assets — time and money — in creating this data. It’s very valuable.
7. Any questions? However good the processes, there are always problems that have to be dealt with by a human being. Telcos have massive call-centre capability, and are used to providing support to both enterprises and consumers.

Does anyone really doubt that there’s money in those capabilities if they can be packaged and promoted appropriately?

Continue reading "The Telecoms Transaction Platform: Seven Key Questions" »

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In Today’s Issue: Mobile apps RIP? And are mobile RIAs the killer? Control your private plane with a Nokia N810; or develop for IMS. It’s your choice. NEC pushes “It’s not IMS”. Sprint = Telco USSR? British ISPs; how not to do it. Comcast: much the same. iPhones; hacked again. Hackers deploy platform strategy. Salesforce.com menace rises. Big changes ahead at Telecom Italia. Nokia GPS-tags photos. Virgin Mobile in India. EU “worse than communism”. And cancerogenic BTS doesn’t exist after all.

Have downloadable mobile applications died the death, to be replaced by a Web-based future? Former Palm and Apple exec Michael Mace thinks so; Carlo Longino agrees. The argument is that the diversity of possible platforms, the difficulty telcos (especially) and vendors have relating to the developer world, and the restrictive terms of business they apply, have rendered it just too difficult for a real developer ecosystem to emerge. Meanwhile, the surge in things like Microsoft Silverlight, Adobe AIR, and JavaFX means that the richness of applications that run in a browser is beginning to challenge what you can achieve reasonably quickly in a native application. This is a significant change in the balance of power between the Web 2.0 players and telcos, since you don’t need a special (telco-issued) digital certificate or pre-installation for web applications.

Continue reading "Ring! Ring! Hot News, 3rd March 2008" »

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So everyone else has done their 3GSM…sorry…Mobile World Congress round-up posts; what did Telco 2.0 think was cool? As you’ll no doubt guess, it wasn’t the shiny gadgets that got us; even at MWC, the anti-shiny goggles all Telco 2.0 team members get issued still block them out. It was a very serious conference this year; we think it may have been the first to get serious about the kinds of communication and enterprise-focused activities that will eventually make serious money for carriers. We broke them down by themes…

Continue reading "Telco 2.0's Private Mobile World Congress" »

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Telco 2.0 comes to you from the Mobile World Congress … sorry … 3GSM this week; not only were we covering the news but we were part of it, but that’s another story.

A big theme in the news this week was mobile Linux; Orange joined the LiMo Foundation, the outfit Motorola ginned up to boost open-source operating systems on shiny gadgets. Azingo, an Indian software house that markets a LiMo-compliant Linux distribution and developer kit, was showing off some of the unexpected capabilities of the technology.

Specifically, using a Broadcom reference gadget running their system, they were successfully using Nokia S60 widgets on a device that was neither a Nokia nor a Symbian S60 platform; we’re not sure if this is fantastic or scary. Which one depends whether you work in the S60 or Maemo Linux groups at Nokia, presumably.

Continue reading "Ring! Ring! Hot News, 11th February 2008" »

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[Ed - reader promotion: If you’re thinking of coming or sending a delegation to the next Telco 2.0 Executive Brainstorm - 16-17 April, London - there’s a 20% discount if you book before 12th Feb. Details here]

This Week: Winners and losers from the cable cut crisis; Deutsche Telekom loses 2 megasubscribers, copies BT’s homework; AT&T EDGE outage; Sprint relaunches iDEN to battle $31bn writeoff; Dunstone darks DunBlog; Vodafone in data price cut, number porting case; Moto considers handset sale; MS vs Yahoo; Android phones are coming; Nokia-Trolltech analysis; IMS pony still yet to be located; 2.5 million SMS news subs in India.

It was the week the network died, what with no less than four major submarine cables getting backhoed (or rather, anchored). Some thought terrorists were assailing the world’s communications infrastructure; others that the giant squid were getting restless down there. Others thought it was the prelude to a US air-raid on Iran; Todd Underwood and his team at Renesys, though, had the data; Iran wasn’t even in the top 10 countries for outages as a percentage of BGP prefixes. As the operators of FLAG & Co scoured the world for cableships, divers and the like, their competitors who still had capacity in the area (like SMW-3, SAFE et al) were circling like vultures.

Continue reading "Ring! Ring! Hot News, 4th February 2008" »

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When you’re lost in the cycle of product development, marketing and customer support it’s sometimes hard to see the big picture of the forces reshaping the structure of the telecoms industry. In particular, telcos are in an unfolding position of co-opetition with what you might call ‘Big Tech’ — the IT technology, commerce and services giants. These increasingly overlap with telco functions. Many of these companies have platform business models. These create value for end users as well as upstream suppliers, and extracting revenue from joining the two sides together. Think Google, Amazon, Sun Microsystems or Salesforce.com. Companies like IBM specialise in construction and servicing of platforms, even if they don’t always feel the need to own them.

We strongly believe that telcos need to form a platform around their own unique assets. But what drives the economics of platforms, how should the telco platform be positioned against those IT platforms, and what lessons can telcos learn from them?

Mass-produced IT processes for a mass-production world

It’s often been suggested that various so-called network industries exhibit increasing returns to scale; whether or not you accept Metcalfe’s law, it’s empirically obvious that the Internet years’ most significant companies have been ones that made their first priority to build scale and volume. For all the above examples, their businesses are all centred on very large IT platforms and their economic models often involve selling at very low prices, or even giving services away, in order to pull in more volume.

Continue reading "Platform businesses: Competing with Big Tech" »

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We’ve been putting together a directory of all “2.0”-type players for our forthcoming Consumer Voice & Messaging 2.0 Report. One newcomer, Ribbit, is offering an early foretaste of what the future environment for developing voice and messaging services might look like.

Ribbit reckons it’s “Silicon Valley’s First Phone Company”. Silly us, we thought that was AT&T. So what is it? The actual product is a VoIP softswitch, available either as a standalone installation or a hosted service, which offers an unprecedentedly extensive collection of APIs for developers to work into their sizzling lashups. Then, there’s a Flash toolkit intended to let the front-end developers design interesting user interfaces to the system’s voice functions, whether on desktops, laptops, or mobile devices. All very Telco 2.0, really.

Perhaps the most impressive thing about Ribbit is that one of the existing applications for it integrates it into Salesforce.com, the hugely successful web-based sales/CRM system; you can’t get more platform-based, enterprise-focused, or two-sided than that. We’re sure there’s huge scope for creativity and user-driven innovation here; but there are some issues that worry us.

Continue reading "Ribbit! The amphibian of telco voice platforms" »

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BT strikes in the set-top box market; they’re the first to ship Xbox360 consoles as IPTV endpoints. And there’s more; BT Vision gets an “on-screen magazine” based on the same single platform. We’ve often said that the fixed-line world doesn’t get user equipment, and that this creates interesting opportunities; BT has just leapt right on it. See our case study on Iliad’s Freebox in the Broadband Business Models report.

PS: we’re trying out a new format for Ring! Ring!…

Continue reading "Ring! Ring! Hot News, 7th January 2008" »

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In this edition of Telco 2.0’s ‘Hot News’ : Viviane Reding wants the power; The iPhone fails to explode in Europe; Who needs Google Android when we’ve got LiMo?; TD-SCDMA gadgets, at last; T-Mobile Shadow under test; 900MHz 3G is here; Sprint and Clearwire fall out; Helio burns yet more cash; BT buys Sonus kit; COLT buys an IMS. Plus, ‘Telco 2.0 Recommends…’: the best from last week’s blogosphere.

Digital Politics and Regulation

Reding wants the power…the power to unbundle all Europe.

Telco 2.0 Comment: Proposed; a single regulator for everything that’s European and telecoms, with you-know-who in charge. It’s a fearful vision if you’re Telco 1.0, and pretty scary if you’re Telco 2.0, come to think of it. Expect much more structural separation if this happens.

Continue reading "Ring! Ring! Monday 'Hot News', 12th November" »

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Alcatel-Lucent is one of the major sponsors of the Telco 2.0 Future Broadband Business Models study, and was a Platinum sponsor of the Telco 2.0 Executive Brainstorm, two weeks ago in London. We asked Martine Lapierre, Vice President Marketing Programs, and one of our panelists at the event, to sum up the potential of IPTV to support new business models, rather than just emulating existing broadcast services.

One of the important insights to come from the Telco 2.0 Future Broadband Business Models survey, and a recurring theme of the Brainstorm event, was the need to give more consideration to end users as a critical telecom asset, and not just as a profit centre. Survey respondents certainly believe broadband service providers should focus on revenue opportunities from partners who want to reach and do business with this customer asset.

We believe that broadband service providers can keep their customers brand-loyal by packaging third party services in a way which addresses end user demands for convenience and simplicity. They can attract upstream revenue by providing meaningful customer intelligence to these third parties (advertisers, government organizations, content providers), who can in turn make their marketing targeted and relevant to end users.

One of the strategies operators are employing to realize this vision is the deployment of IPTV services to households around the world.

Why? IPTV services give broadband service providers the following:

1. A touch point within the customers’ home network — strengthening the broadband service provider’s relationship with that all-important customer asset.
2. Ownership and management of a back-end channel capable of providing very rich customer behaviour and intelligence, which can be monetized.
3. The ability to broker engagement between a number of 3rd parties and consumers through the most-watched screen in the household today.
4. An anchor to evolve towards more sophisticated ad insertion, ad-sponsored distribution, and other models of content distribution.

The survey — sponsored in part by Alcatel-Lucent — will finally close at midnight tonight GMT. Last chance to complete it if you want a free copy of the summary results!

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Telco 2.0 Comment: We’re delighted to have the people from Red Hat’s telco business at Telco 2.0. Ivelin Ivanov, their director of product development, agreed to do a guest post for us about telcos and their JBoss Java-based comms platform; it’s like a really tiny SDP that fits into products like IP-PBXs. In fact, when Ivelin demonstrated it, it turned out it was running on his laptop. If that isn’t cool, I don’t know what is.

Earlier this year the web thought leaders launched amazing new online tools for web mashups - Yahoo Pipes, Microsoft Popfly and Google Mashup Editor. They took over the web developers community by storm and changed the way applications are written and deployed. A new computing environment emerged.

A series of posts followed in the telco blogosphere, proposing interesting ideas for telco mashups. Some good examples came up during the O’Reilly Emerging Telephony Conference (ETel).

It was magical for me to find out that a tier one carrier was tuned in and listening to all the cool talk in town. Not only listening but also acting on it. Last week I was presented with early access account to an online service exposing telco services in a way easily consumable by mashups. Hopefully the service will reach general availability shortly and I will be able to post more about my experience with it while creating converged online services.

While there is a lot being said about creating mashups, it is less clear how one can create services that can be converged via mashups. Recently Telco 2.0 wrote about evolving telco platforms. The article argued that while Level 1 and 2 platforms are feasible and will evolve, Level 3 platforms have no future.

We would like to challenge the latter statement. L3 platforms are proven to work well in the enterprise middleware market and are starting to take off in the telco middleware space as well. At least open source L3 platforms are.

Yesterday, on the Telco 2.0 Product and Partnership Innovation track, I demonstrated a DVD Online Store service, which will show convergence of several middleware technologies - web, SOA, process management, and call control running on an integrated Level 3 service delivery platform.

Continue reading "Red Hat@Telco 2.0; Re-Engineering Telco Infrastructure" »

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As a preview to the Telco 2.0 event next week in London, here are some relevant news items from the last week to help stimulate the furious debate among the participating cognoscenti:

Ever wanted to physically wave a game controller round your head? Now you can, thanks to Nokia researcher Paul Coulson.

Continue reading "Ring! Ring! Monday News Analysis, 8th October" »

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“One of the hottest of hot topics these days is the topic of Internet platforms, or platforms on the Internet. Web services APIs (application programming interfaces), web services protocols like REST and SOAP, the new Facebook platform, Amazon’s web services efforts including EC2 and S3, lots of new startups talking platform (including my own company, Ning)… well, “platform” is turning into a central theme of our industry and one that a lot of people want to think about and talk about.

Indeed. Andreessen is certainly right to say that there is a lot of confusion about it, too - we mentioned this in our post on jNetX. In an attempt to clarify this, he defines a platform as any system capable of modification by the user; we broadly agree with this. What we find more interesting is his three-way typology of platforms, and the importance he attaches to them.

Continue reading "Evolving Internet 'Platforms' - Lessons for Telcos?" »

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Members of the Telco 2.0 team went on a trip to the Italian Lakes this week, where we were stimulating and facilitating an impressively organised conference for Service Delivery Platform experts jNetX and a gaggle of telco people from most parts of Europe. We used a basic version of our interactive Mindshare approach to elicit audience feedback on the issues raised.

Some people there had a funny reaction to our use of the word “platform”, central as it is to the Telco 2.0 vision - isn’t a platform really an operating system? Or something used when drilling for oil? They’re right, of course; a Telco 2.0 platform is a sort of operating system, just as Salesforce.com or Amazon’s IT infrastructure can be seen as a sort of single huge computer. But it became increasingly clear that this cuts both ways; you need the right platform in the second sense to do a platform in the first sense right.

Continue reading "How Practical is your SDP?" »

Posted at 06:35 PM | Link to this article | 1 comment

Telco 2.0 was supporting the 21C Global Summit at Blenheim Palace this week. And what did we find?

Well, it’s increasingly clear that our ideas have traction. Everyone who so much as touched on telco business models, or the infrastructure that underlies them, agreed on key points; points that could have been taken from the last few months of this blog or the main texts of Telco 2.0. The challenge now is to fully internalise what these mean within telco organisations and create some action plans to do something about it. This requires stronger leadership - a recurring theme of the event.

For example, Andy Zimmermann of Accenture’s Technology Strategy practice opened the conference pipes on Wednesday morning by explaining the importance of some Ps; portals, partners, and platforms were all there. Another was “plexes”, which rather than being another word for your navel was used to refer to big IT infrastructure. Again, that’s certainly a theme you’d meet in your daily Telco 2.0. Further, Zimmermann cited content-delivery networking, secure control of sensitive data, and payments as crucial functions telcos need to develop.

Not just that, but the means he recommended had a notable Telco 2.0 feel; specifically, telcos needed to work on their service-delivery platforms, which don’t need to be IMS. (See Martin’s post for more on this…)

He wasn’t the only one, either; Ross Fowler, Cisco’s VP in Europe, drew everyone’s attention to the curious way the functions of content providers are converging with those the GSM/UMTS standards world think are the core functions of a telco. For example, they require high-level applications such as video editing and collaboration, policy/authentication functions to control how their output is released - and the indispensable networking infrastructure to haul bits. Ross, by the way, will be going into more detail about this at the Telco 2.0 Executive Brainstorm on the 17th of October.

Continue reading "21C Global Summit: A Weird Consensus..." »

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Readers of Telco 2.0 are probably well aware that we like the British model of structural separation, where the local loop is controlled by a specially-created company with a duty to provide nondiscriminatory access to all-comers, a lot. This approach helps to mitigate risk across the BT Group and, theoretically at least, liberates the individual units (Retail, Wholesale, Access) to be more innovative and responsive to customer needs (levelling the playing field a little with internet players like Google). (More on the benefits of this here).

Naturally, we jumped at the chance to interview the good people at Openreach, the BT access division. Especially in the light of rumours that BT might be considering a KPN-like deployment of fibre to the street cabinets; which would make the Local Loop Unbundling model Openreach was formed to defend partly obsolete.

Our interview with Steve Robertson, CEO of Openreach, (who will also be a stimulus speaker at the Telco 2.0 Executive Brainstorm in October) is below the fold…

Continue reading "Making Structural Separation Work: Interview with Steve Robertson, CEO, Openreach" »

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A key feature of Telco 2.0 analysis is our effort to understand the limits of the end-to-end principle; how stupid can a stupid network be without being, well, stupid? Networks have to be intelligent in some ways; routing, for example, requires a lot of intelligence although restricted quite tightly to one task.

So we were very interested by a recent NANOG thread regarding improvements in how the Internet deals with major congestion on backbone links. Famously, the Internet is meant to route around damage, but this only works when there is enough route diversity to absorb the diverted traffic. In a major outage, for example the one that followed an earthquake in the Luzon Strait earlier this year, the problem is often that too many people are trying to fit through the remaining links at once.

This is where the fundamental principles of internetworking bite you in the behind; most Internet protocols work on the principle that, if one attempt to do something fails, you try again. TCP achieves reliable delivery by resending packets that are not acknowledged within their time-to-live, until a timeout. The problem is that if there is a major problem, very large numbers of users’ applications will all try to resend; generating a packet storm and creating even more congestion.

So wouldn’t it be nice if you could tell everyone to slow down?

Continue reading "Variable Speed Limits for the Internet" »

Posted at 06:19 PM | Link to this article | 1 comment

These weekly news roundups are a new Telco 2.0 service; they are meant to focus attention on news items that might not be Telco 2.0-related at first sight, or big enough to warrant a whole post to themselves, but do contain real insight. They are grouped under the categories used in the rest of Telco 2.0.

Digital Youth

When Search Attacks: Participants in a fancy ID-business social network were horrified when a bot used to auto-populate their profiles libelled leading sci-fi author John Scalzi. He’d repeatedly written about disgraced congressman Mark Foley and used the word “paedophile”; guess what the bot decided to put in his “description” field?

Telco 2.0 Comment: Remember, automatic robots and highly personal information are a dangerous mix. If the AOL security breach was farce, this is tragedy, especially as Spock includes a function for users to vote on each other’s reputations.

T-Mobile Tees Up 3G: First 3G device for T-Mobile USA leaked…but the real news is that even without UMTS, data usage ex-SMS is booming.

Telco 2.0 Comment: T-Mobile is better known for its open-slather Web’n’Walk tariff in Europe, but how to explain its US data boom? Our theory is that its historic price leadership, going back to the days of Voicestream, captured a demographic that’s now adopting new gadgets and services rapidly. Note that AT&T just got FCC approval for the US’s first HSUPA data card - 2Mbits/s uplink, 7.2 down.

Digital Cities

Wi-Fi…Why? Cali-utopian geeks’ dream of free Wi-Fi everywhere doesn’t work. Maybe they could have a crack at the space elevator instead?

Telco 2.0 Comment: There’s a reason why mobile operators have lots of radio engineers, you know. And billing departments.

Paranoia in the palm of your hand: New Sprint service lets you browse sex offenders’ register from your phone; so you can find a sex offender in a hurry? No, of course, it’s for your peace of mind..

Telco 2.0 Comment: “Checking for local offenders is free…after normal data charges” It’s one way to get those metered bits moving. In Telco 2.0 terms, this is somewhere between Digital Home and Digital Town. Notably, some other carriers offer various security-related services; MTN in South Africa streams your home CCTV camera feeds to your 3G device and texts you if the alarm goes off. At least you can do something about that other than “move house” or “collect angry mob”.

Digital Politics and Regulation

AT&T spotted wielding censor’s scissors! Astonishingly, David “Stupid Network” Isenberg isn’t at all pleased that AT&T’s web music portal censored Pearl Jam being rude about President Bush. Perhaps it says more about AT&T that they’re hoping to make a profit streaming Pearl Jam over the web? Isenberg, again unsurprisingly, thinks this is an argument for network neutrality.

Telco 2.0 Comment: So that’s what they wanted all that IMS gear for! More seriously, as John Waclawsky said, monitoring is the first step to control.

ESPN’s efforts to have fewer customers are a roaring success; the cable-TV sports channel may give up on a scheme to restrict access to its website to customers of ISPs who pay it for the privilege.

Telco 2.0 Comment: The idea was that viewers who couldn’t get to see the videos would complain to their ISP; it could have perhaps been predicted that they would complain to ESPN’s website about not being able to see content on their website. Further, the economics of this are a little strange; there is no pot of gold in the customer ISP world for content providers to get their hands on, quite the opposite with margins tanking all over the world.

Too many zeros; Telekom Malaysia bills subscriber 17 times the GDP of the United States. Sorry, that should be “bills deceased ex-subscriber”…

Telco 2.0 Comment: When you do something often enough, even 99.999% sometimes isn’t enough.

Digital Product Innovation

3UK to offer cheap mobile data; 1GB/month=£10, 7GB/month=£25.

Telco 2.0 Comment: In the future, data transfer will be cheap. Cheaper and cheaper. How will 3 make money from this?

Nokia does identity and social networking: sadly, they call it Mosh. In other awful branding news, will Sprint-Nextel call its WiMAX service XOHM?

Telco 2.0 Comment: I, ah, hope you know what you’re doing with that ad budget.. Seriously, there’s so much interest in SNS these days it’s no surprise Nokia is interested, if only as a research project into user interfaces. It probably helps if your users can pronounce the service..Oh God, they’re actually going to do it…

Posted at 04:21 PM | Link to this article | Add a comment

Centralised architectures can always cause trouble. Not that this is a point in distributed systems’ favour, necessarily; look what just happened to Skype, which has suffered a whole day’s outage.

We at Telco 2.0, as you may know, are actually a group intellect, structured rather like the brain of a large cephalopod. Rather than one single brain, there is a node for each tentacle, the whole being interconnected by the highest-bandwidth nerve fibres known in nature. Unlike the squid, the Telco 2.0 team uses Skype quite heavily in order to maintain coherence among its multiple cerebellums (cerebella?), so we may be forgiven for feeling a little sporky. We’ve been debased to using Google Talk for much of the day.

Telco 2.0 in its natural habitat

So all day, access to Skype has been to all intents and purposes impossible, starting around 1000 hours GMT. The pathology takes the following form; on start-up, the Skype client successfully registers on the network (often with considerable delay), but rapidly logs-off again, and struggles to reconnect. During the brief intervals of successful operation, the number of logged-in users is very low; between 100,000 and 320,000 according to our own observations.

What was up? Surely the nature of a peer-to-peer network means that there is no single point of failure? Well, everyone speculated, so why not us too?

Continue reading "404 Skype Not Found" »

Posted at 01:15 AM | Link to this article | 6 comments

With the evolution of the IMS technology, Wipro has matured its IMS offerings towards becoming an integral part of the converged digital media delivery ecosystem,” said Nagamani Murthy, Wipro VP, mobile and consumer electronics group.

But who would imagine it would stop there? At Wipro, they have a constant risk of a namespace collision with another IMS; Infrastructure Management Services. This is the line of business where they install, commission, and manage private networks, including (according to their website) high-capacity switching systems. And IMS is nothing if it’s not a high-capacity switching system. OK, so network outsourcing is not that new an idea, but the shift to IP-based networks means there’s something much more disruptive out there..

Scientists prepare to experiment on a helpless telco

Continue reading "IT Giants: Commoditise This!" »

Posted at 02:14 PM | Link to this article | Add a comment

If you’ve been with us so far, you probably know that Telco 2.0 likes content-delivery networking (CDNing) a lot. So much so we invited an executive vice president from market leaders Akamai Networks to the next Telco 2.0 executive brainstorm this October. Even though a couple of CDN operators - Akamai and Limelight - recently had a bad day on the stock market, we’re still confident of this judgement. After all, when Wall Street is annoyed because your profits were only up 55 per cent, it’s probably their problem rather than yours.

A CDN, to recap, is a way of delivering bandwidth-heavy content (usually video) over the Internet efficiently. Standard methods have the downside that the same material has to be transferred out of the provider’s network, over the backbone, and into the user’s ISP network at least once for each user; peering and transit costs are incurred at each stage. Further, the load on the provider’s servers is a problem. In a CDN, Web servers are placed at strategic points inside customer ISPs and filled with content. Requests are then redirected to the CDN box, so each item only has to be transferred outside the ISP once.

It has the major advantage that everyone’s happy; you’re happy because the load on your own servers is relieved, and your stuff is delivered faster than the competition, your ISP is happy because their peers aren’t yelling any more, and the downstream ISP is happy because the weight of traffic has been moved inside their own system, where (depending on their business model) it’s either cheaper or effectively free. And none of this involves reducing other people’s quality of service or doing any other evil. It’s elegant engineering, and good economics.

The reason, deeper down, why CDNing works is that it understands where the bottlenecks are; the critical paths, the limiting factors, the maximum cuts. In this case, the bottleneck is the network edge, because it’s where the economic activity occurs. The Internet’s economic model is that interconnection is what creates value, realised either by barter (peering) or in cash (transit).

So why are there no CDNs in mobile networking?

Continue reading "Why are there no mobile CDNs?" »

Posted at 12:13 PM | Link to this article | 4 comments

The news that Sigrid Löthberg, Peter Löthberg’s 75-year old grandmother, has the world’s fastest Internet connection has now passed through the Web’s digestive tract. All the oohing and aahing is complete. It’s certainly very cool that she has 40Gbits/s connectivity and a CRS-1 router in her garden shed, but it is only a demonstration project.

However, it does tell us quite a lot about how Cisco thinks the future will be. And there will not be a CRS-1 in every pot any time soon. The fibre, well, that’s a different story. Sweden, like some other countries, has a number of projects that aim at the creation of shared, open-access fibre infrastructure. It’s a question of getting the institutions and economics right; aggregating enough customers to spread the capex while guaranteeing open access to preserve competition. And that, by the way, is what the Digital Town strand of Telco 2.0 is all about, and the focus of the Digital Cities summit on the 18th of October: find out more here.

Continue reading "40Gbits Granny and the Future of Telecoms" »

Posted at 03:28 PM | Link to this article | Add a comment

So what’s up with Google and the 700MHz spectrum? Well, Google has “pre-bid”-that is, declared its interest in bidding-for a large block of radio spectrum in the US’s 700MHz ex-TV band. (See here.) The big friendly search engine (or menacing, Orwellian data monster, depending on point of view) doesn’t just want the spectrum for itself; it wants it to be sublicensed for public access.

Traditionally, the economic value of radio spectrum has been largely an economic rent, originating from the fact that licenses grant a monopoly of its use. No cash changes hands when the various unlicensed bands, such as the 2.4GHz swamp beloved of Wi-Fi users worldwide, are used; even though, of course, its use creates value for the user, this isn’t accounted for.

So why would anyone want nonexclusive spectrum? Isn’t it a contradiction in terms? And what does Google plan to do with it? Google, after all, is a model Telco 2.0 company, designed around the
horizontalisation of the industry (NB: in the plenary session of the Telco 2.0 Executive Brainstorm in October we’ll be talking about ‘coopetition’ strategies based on some new analysis by our senior stimulus presenters).

Continue reading "Google anchors its carrier off the coast of Telcoland" »

Posted at 02:11 PM | Link to this article | 6 comments

The US’s second-biggest VoIP carrier, SunRocket, is bankrupt. You wouldn’t have been very surprised, had you read this article on Telco2.0, or even this one from back in 2003.

Not so long ago, Google bought a small company called GrandCentral Technologies that provided a hosted SIP gateway - permitting its customers to route multiple PSTN/PLMN or carrier VoIP numbers, or SIP names, to a single inbox they can access from any Internet connection. What connects these two facts?

First up, companies like SunRocket and Vonage originally succeeded because they confiscated some of the traditional telcos’ economic rents. An economic rent is defined as a return which is entirely due to scarcity; you don’t do anything to get it. In the past, bandwidth was scarce and difficult, and bound tightly to the telco’s infrastructure of identification, billing, and authorisation. With the plummeting cost of moving bits over IP, the proportion of a telco’s profits which are attributable to artificial scarcity has greatly increased - as Li Mo, chief network architect at ZTE USA put it, “the network is so much simpler when you take out the charging mechanisms.”

With the arrival of IP, it became possible to separate addressing, identification, authorisation, and payment from any one particular network. Instead, you can now assemble functions horizontally across different companies. VoIP carriers do their own number allocation and billing, and use other people’s networks for access (but usually their own in the backbone, whether real or virtual). It’s what we call Voice & Messaging 2.0.

Using really cheap transport, and being willing to accept lower margins, providers of what we might call “bog-standard VoIP” were able to capture some of those rents. But the same principle applies to them, in so far as their business model depends on the difference between the price they charge an average customer per bit and the price they pay to their transit providers, less the cost of customer care. Somebody could always come along and undercut them, and they did; traditional carriers entering a price war with deep pockets, new VoIP providers, and software-based VoIP operations like Skype or Gizmo - who don’t carry their own bits and whose product is often free.

These companies rely for their money (where they actually make money, that is) on the sort of alternative value propositions you’ll find at Telco 2.0 - and especially in our Data Transport Systems project - on a regular basis - presence/availability control, integration with other applications, and premium interconnection with older systems. So what does this have to do with GrandCentral?

Continue reading "By Grand Central Station SunRocket declared Chapter 11" »

Posted at 11:47 AM | Link to this article | Add a comment

Aepona have some strong and interesting views on SDP architecture. We asked Michael Crossey, who’s a stimulus presenter at our Technology Insiders’ SDP/IMS workshop at the Telco 2.0 event this Thursday to explain the impact of ‘The Long Tail’ on SDP architectures. He says:

“Those of you who are regular readers of Telco 2.0 blogs, and followers of developments in the world of Web 2.0 in general, will no doubt be familiar with the concept of the “Long Tail”. For those who aren’t, the Long Tail is a term used to describe certain business and economic models in which the accumulative sales value of niche or specialist products exceeds that of the most popular products. This effect tends to be associated with Internet-based business such as Amazon and iTunes, where the costs of inventory storage and distribution are low relative to traditional businesses.

For such business models, research has shown that consumers place much higher value on the availability of niche products that appeal to their specific interests, than on the pricing of those products. Increasingly, this concept is being applied to content such as video, particularly as telecommunications operators consider how they can differentiate emerging IPTV services against the current offerings from established mass-market broadcasters. Some of these operators are looking to leverage the Long Tail effect by offering a broad range of specialised IPTV content to their subscriber base, taking advantage of an IP-based storage, transport and distribution infrastructure that allows them to achieve this cost-effectively.

So what has all of this got to do with Service Delivery Platform architectures?

Continue reading "New SDP Architecture needed for 'The Long Tail'" »

Posted at 06:15 PM | Link to this article | Add a comment