Results tagged “700mhz” from Emerging Communications Blog

Last Tuesday I had the pleasure of interviewing by phone, Richard Whitt, Google's Washington Telecom and Media Counsel.

We discussed such things as Richard's role at Google, the 700 MHz auction, white spaces, the change of FCC chairman, Obama's stimulus package, challenging the broadband access dualopy, and a number of other things. 2009-01-27-richard-whitt-96.mp3

The run time is 27 minutes.

The transcript is also available in full on the CircleID site here.

At the start of 2008 I had the pleasure of doing a pre-conference interview with good friend Martin Geddes. We had sat down together for a 15 minute chat. But before we knew it, we had chatted away for over an hour, which we were only forced to terminate only because the batteries of the recorder died. Due to time constraints, only part of the interview was ever published. But since the content quality was so high I put it on my to do list to publish it in full at a later date. I'm glad to say I finally got around to have a new and full transcription done!

(Note: other "Martin media" was his appearance twice on video during the 2008 conference, once for his keynote and once for the wireless innovation panel)

2008-01-12-martin-geddes-full-interview-96.mp3

The run time is 1 hour and 4 minutes.

In the huge transcript below, I've blockquoted Martin to distinguish the pair of us from each other.

So tell me about your Telco 2.0 initiative? What is the Telco 2.0 initiative?

The telecom industry is in a state of flux and it's following a path that other industries have followed in the past. If you look at the physical logistics industry, containership came along and it broke apart the vertical integrated break box system. Instead you got this big steel packet that's been moved around; it became very modular horizontalized industry. The financial services use to be very vertically integrated. The same company that you went to, to go buy a mortgage from, you spent the next twenty years paying that same company and they had a loan on their books. That was it. Now, the moment you've taken out your mortgage, they go and resell that debt on the mortgage market. There are all kinds of specialists who package up and resell it. Telco 2.0 is about moving to a world where vertical integration in the telecommunications industry is coming to an end. You're seeing new industry structures emerge. It's how to remain profitable and alive in that environment.

When you say vertically integrated, my mind instantly jumps to applications. Are you saying that telephony and SMS, these are what I understand to be vertical products, are you meaning by vertical the industry as a whole in some kind of business fashion, or are you meaning applications when you spoke there?

There are many parts of this puzzle. So you are right; there is a question like the macro organization of the industries. Once upon a time AT&T also had Bell Labs. AT&T controlled local and long distance and the technology side.

There's also the vertical integration in what we call the applications stack. Between the application itself, the session control or whatever goes underneath the application to enable it; what pages you have, HTTP; you know they are separate things on the web. Then you have the core transport, the protocols like TCP and IP. Then you have the low level stuff like Ethernet and physical infrastructure. There's a question of integration in that.

There's also a separate question of virtual integration. That was kind of the technology integration. Did the application at the top have to care about what kind of network it was running over?  Is there stuff in the middle hiding that away from it? 

There's also a separate thing which is the commercial integrations. You mentioned telephony and SMS. What's interesting about them is that when you make a phone call or send a text message, it isn't just what goes over some dedicated network specifically for telephony or text messaging. Also, the money flows in the counter direction.

When you send a text message, you go and get charged 10p for sending that message. It's the combination of technical vertical integration and commercial vertical integration that makes different patterns for different types of system for distributing data to users. Let me give you some examples of that.

Take something like a content delivery network that your iTunes, Apple - you want to go and deliver movies over the Internet to end users. The end users will then download it over their standard Internet connection. It's a very low amount of technical integration between the movie and the ISP client. They don't need to know about each other.

But there's a content delivery network somewhere in the middle that Apple is paying that content delivery provider to cache and deliver that movie. So there's money flowing back and forth. It's based on the volume of movies. There's some degree of commercial integration. So you can move the levers back and forth and look at different parts of the puzzle of delivering voice and video and other forms of data. You can get varying degrees of technical and commercial integration.

It seems somewhat complex to say the absolute least. Would you agree with this?

It is complex [laughter], but what's interesting about it is that we currently have this utter total fixation on the broadband ISP product, which is one where the applications have access to no means of transferring money based on who's going to pay for delivering this movie. There's no API for payments to an ISP. I'm happy to go and get the user to download this movie from this website and please, I'll pay for its delivery. Don't count these bytes against the user's monthly usage cap. This is what the application provider would like.

So you've got this total fixation with the broadband ISP product, which has the benefit of separating the applications from their delivery, but also loses in that process the commercial richness of the telephony and the SMS. That's a problem. Although it's complex, the model of different kinds of vertical integration be it technical or commercial, it's very important because the future of the Internet and the future of broadband is largely about putting back into it some of the rich commercial models from other delivery distribution systems like the PSTN fixed telephony system, but without all the technical limitations of old legacy systems.

Surely, if you pay for connectivity, you decide how many Gigs you want, what speed you want, you purchase connectivity as a product, surely it should not be bound in any way to the application. An application you may pay for, you may not pay for, but these are separate things?

There are a number of subtleties to that question. One of which is basic connectivity, what do we really mean?  There are really two parts to that. One of which is getting the pure access part, which is how do I get from my mobile device to the cell tower, or from my device in my home up to the central office?  It's renting that copper pair or that co-axe cable, the fiber that gets me to the place where telco things start to happen.

Then separately from that there's a question of getting the data across the world to where ever it needs to go. What we're seeing is that the access component is relatively steady over time.

Steady in what fashion?

In terms of how people are going to pay for this. Here in the UK, you pay 12 pounds a month to BT for your line rental. That's the access component and separately you pay for an ISP plan; for 17.99 pounds a month you go and get Tesco Broadband [a no frills service]. Now for you the broadband service is at the top.

So, what we're going to see is that the users don't like having to think about how many megabytes and megabits they need. So if you want to go and access the new BBC iPlayer online, and you're on Tesco value broadband, you've only got a one Gigabyte usage limit in the month. The average user is not going to want to start thinking about the bit rate to this streaming video. All they want to know is "Either I'm buying some product, which comes postage and packing included, or it's some ad funded thing from YouTube and Google is paying for the whole delivery of this thing."  What they don't want to do is have to think about megabytes and megabits themselves.

Also, they don't want to have to provision a new set of access every place they go to. So when you go to your parents at Christmas and you spend all Christmas trying to recover from the turkey and pie in the bedroom; to surf the web [laughter] rather than interrupt the relatives, you don't really want all your usage at your parents house to be counted against your parent's ISP plan because they might be on Tesco value broadband and not on the super business class version that you prefer.

So we have to work out how to go and package the access, the data service itself, and the application devices in new and different ways to sell the user exactly the thing they value and no more or no less.

I think one of the best example at the moment is Amazon's Kindle product. You buy this device. It's got EVDO or whatever it is, built in as a network access. It does exactly what it says on the tin; this device will deliver your ebooks. You don't have to think about megabytes and megabits. You don't have to think about where it's provisioned. You don't have to think about hot spots and "Gee, I get the WiFi here and only have cellular there."   It just does it. It's been packaged up perfectly.

So bundling connectivity with a device, a specific device, I can see how it has value. Look at SMS. It's something which is bound to a device and connectivity and it just works. Do you know what the value of the SMS market was last year?

It's about one hundred billion dollars a year.  The figures obviously for 2007 aren't all out yet, but it was pushing one hundred billion dollars, which is bigger than movies and music and the game software industry all put together. There's something special about it, clearly. For the few gigabytes worth of traffic that all the SMS adds up to be, it's a relatively small amount, the users are paying very, very large amounts of money; only if you view that purely from our technical viewpoint. What it's telling us is a couple of things.

One of them is that when you break apart a product into smaller pieces and sell it, by the sachet rather than buy the big bulk bottle, you get much higher margins. When you buy something wholesale, it's generally bought in huge amounts at very low margins. By the time you're selling it in a tiny sachet, the margins go up.

Another thing is that SMS is a distribution system for messages and data. Each of these distribution systems has a large number of attributes, one or two of which are what kind of technical data can it carry and how can you make payments through it? But it has a whole lot of other attributes as well. For example, the difference between SMS and the Internet is that SMS is based on phone numbers; phone numbers are attached to countries. So if you are running the Eurovision song contest and you want people to vote for songs, but they can't vote for the song from their own country, with SMS it's easy to filter out those votes; if Germans vote for the German entries, ignore it.

With Internet you can't, with high certainty, know which country or jurisdiction an IP address is attached to. It's easy to fake it as well. So there is tons of cheating, if you try to do Internet voting for the Eurovision song contest. So it's only by understanding the full suite of attributes that these distribution systems have and their cultural context and their expectations? 

Like Telex, it has particular laws. It has legal force in the way that other forms of communication maybe don't. You have fax and it became a legal form of communication ten or fifteen years ago, even though it existed for longer. You have to look at the whole context of each of these systems.

The clever thing you can do as a telco application provider is to blend together these different systems, to create in effect, new communications media. I think an impressive example at the moment is something like The Sky Anytime box, where it downloads ...

You just mentioned Sky but that is British only?

Sky is a multinational satellite broadcaster but I don't know if this box is available outside of the UK market. This box is their way a telly takes content from the satellite; it caches it on the hard drive inside the box. You can also plug into broadband and download content over broadband. It's a clever little box, they can push down to you what you might want to watch. It merges together broadcast and broadband. Of course, you can have your DVD player underneath the telly as well. There are multiple ways of delivering bits to the user. Sky has blended together the best of several different distribution systems into a new one.

To passive consumers, this is an interactive thing [the Internet]. I am getting slightly scared in case we end up with glorified CD players hanging off the end of networks.

What's the lesson from that Sky example? Or Netflicks. Netflicks is using the Internet as a signalling mechanism and the postal service as the bearer. The postal service is a very efficient way of transferring tens of hundreds of gigabytes worth of data.

I think the important lesson is when you take this to where the cash is; the money is in voice, there's been this fixation with Voice Over IP for a number of years and actually maybe - this is heresy - but maybe the good old-fashioned phone system is really good at transferring voice [laughter]. Time-division multiplexing?  It does constant bit rate voice very well. You have to throw an awful lot of technology at a problem that doesn't exist to try to persuade anyone to move over to Voice Over IP.

Anyone understanding the full context and capabilities of each of these systems should start to think, "Hey, actually maybe what the Internet is good at is allowing new forms of signalling to evolve faster than SS7 or whatever might otherwise allow. Even those things in principle could evolve."

Well it allows niche signalling systems instead some large monolithic controlled block.

Why don't we focus on enabling the IP parts to the thing it does well, which is, "Hey how do we enable the rendezvous in front of this phone call?  How do we send signals and presence data and the picture of where I'm at or vacation information wherever it might be, to help people make phone calls at the right time, is getting it to both of them. " 

Then, stop worrying about trying to do Voice Over IP until the technology is upper duper mature and people decide that we can't possibly afford to maintain two networks, which is quite a long way away still. Let the phone network do what it does well, which is phone calls.

So, for 2008, you're promoting TDM? [laughter]

Oh, yes. [laughter] TDM ... the future is in...

In TDM. We bypassed it and now we realize we should have just stuck on it. [laughter]

Embrace, extend, extinquish - yes - as Bill Gates would tell you.

I cannot help, and there's so many topics you've cast up and so many things I want to ask as usual, but immediately on that point what do you feel will be of BT21CN then?  Because with British Telecom's 21st century network they are going to switch off their TDM in say 2011.

21CN is a really big thing. There are lots of different parts to that project. If we're just focusing on the voice network part itself, I'm not privy to how they start paying their suppliers for the TDM equipment, and what the situation would have been with end of life-ing support for their equipment and the like and spare parts.

Well, BT is on record as saying they're going to be saving one billion a year in OPEX.

So by spending a large number of billions you have CAPEX you get OPEX savings. I am not privy to the figures. But, what I would be tempted to do was look at how long it's been from inception to delivery for 21CN.

How it was sitting now, I went to the BT website and it said 21CN will be turned on at this road in Edinburgh in 2011. It's the beginning of 2008 and in my book, that's an awful long time to be planning a technology project over in this environment.

You could have built a wrapper around the existing voice network, offering web services and other capabilities, and started to enable lots of the quote "advanced services" that the 21CN would offer years earlier if you had wanted to.

Maybe this [BT21CN] is a longer term approach. Maybe it [not doing BT21CN] would have given you incremental services whereas with BT21CN it is going to give you something which is going to be suitable longer term. You can do more with it because it's an entirely new network, a very fast network.

You can see the allure of moving to an all IP network, but you also have to understand the high risk of having any project that has a five to ten year implementation timescales. Because remember that whatever protocol and architecture that you are choosing at the outset might be obsolete by the time you get to the end. Look at SIP, which was the obvious clear winner out of all the IP signal protocols, even that has its problems. It's got it's architectural mistakes.  It's got incompatibilities. It's been an absolute nightmare to get everyone to have the same understanding of what this particular SIP message...

You mean it's not the session initiation protocol, but the subject to interpretation protocol?

Yes, absolutely [laughter]. And as a result, the chances of SIP itself being exposed to the application developer and being in the interoperability layer, probably isn't going to happen.

Then how do you expose it to the application developers?

I think that these things, if not IMS is all about 'they're good at certain things' and you need to understand what they're good at. What is SIP or IMS good at?  Well, it's good at provisioning, doing signalling to say, "Hey, Tom over here has paid a certain amount of money to have a certain kind of traffic be hauled over this network", over some kind of virtual overlay or whatever they are going to do on top of it. It could be a full capacity reserve pipe we're going to pretend runs over this network. Or, it's going to be something that's prioritized; it's going to be best effort or whatever. It's [IMS] good at managing that, provisioning of virtual circuit.

What it isn't necessarily good at is trying to have a common understanding of what some presence message might mean in the future, because it's all contextual to the user. You go on-hook or off-hook even. Even something as trivial as that, having a common understanding of that would be, you might say, if people have speakerphones, or they go three-way calling;  you add these new features in and suddenly what does that old message mean in this new context?  It might not mean the same thing as it used to. Even if technically you get these networks to inter-operate, it doesn't necessarily mean they're inter-operating it in the users mind.

So let the signalling protocols do what they're good at which is help the telco be a logistics provider; a personalized logistics provider for data. That's what telcos are. They haul data around from point 'A' to point 'B', but they do it using a number of means so it could be broadband, could be content delivery network, or edge caching which is where you broadcast something out like Sky, cache it at the edge of the network and then you can redistribute it to other people who on the edge of the network.

You can do this with Sky?

Whether the Sky box has peer-to-peer redistribution, I'll need to go and have a look, but certainly edge caching is a capability that some of these set top boxes have.

What the telco does, just like a logistics provider for atoms blends together rail, sea, land and air transport, telco blends together all these different types of delivery. In voice you have prioritized networks versus best effort versus full circuit switched and packages them up with the application and the device, but it doesn't get involved in the applications themselves.

All they are doing is helping these people get the data from 'A' to 'B', which isn't being just a dumb pipe. It's a lot more complicated than being a dumb pipe. Because you have to slice and dice up that pipe, enable competing and contending uses of the pipe to be prioritized against each other to be able to have much finer grained provisioning of the pipe.

For example, when you're at home and you're accessing your employer's internal sites over VPN, surely your employer should be paying to have all that VPN traffic being hauled. You shouldn't be saying, "Well, I'm paying 20 pounds a month for my broadband. Maybe I'll expense 5 pounds a month to my employer." No, they should be paying for it, even if you haven't got broadband at home at all, as a retail ISP for yourself, you should have to have access to your employer's stuff [via broadband].

Is this not like beginning to say that if you buy a kettle, that somebody else should be paying for the electricity that goes into the kettle and maybe somebody should pay for the electricity going into the washing machine?  Shouldn't connectivity, the ability to haul bits - bandwidth - into the home, shouldn't that be treat just as electricity coming into the home?

It's interesting.

We're falling into the net neutrality thing here.

There are some specific things about the power industry and electricity distribution, which are interesting. This contrasts with the postal system. When you have something delivered over postal system, you can either buy a stamp or you can go and get a prepaid envelope or you can just put it in the postal system and have it run off and not pay postage at all and somebody else then has to go and pay penalty postage at the other end. There are all kinds of different ways of deciding who pays for the thing being posted. It could be the person at either end.

Electricity distribution, a bit like broadband, doesn't offer these different payment mechanisms. There are good reasons for this. It could be tied to technological issues. It could the history of the medium itself. In some ways it could be a good thing that appliance has to account for its own usage.

I'm thinking accounting for CO2 production or something. If some old appliance that you have in the house is rated to use 1kWh a month and suddenly it's using three because its fuse is burning out or something, and de-provisions itself from the network, that would be a good.

But, there are actually good reasons why the power network doesn't have this capability. If you take a slightly different example, like the great blackout in the Northern US a few years ago, that was partly caused because they were trying to move to a more horizontal industry structure. They forgot that power distribution was vertically integrated for a really good reason, which was that no matter what you're abstraction was in terms of energy trading, the reality was that you had currents flowing through wires. When you have too much current going through wire it gets hot and it starts to sag. If it sags too far it touches the wire below and they short out and your power system fails. That's what happened. The power line network literally melted because too much power started to go in the induction loop pattern and it all went wrong.

So, you needed someone end to end to be able to manage the whole vertically integrated distributed system. There are historical reasons, not technical reasons why some of these networks don't develop sort of modular layered interfaces.

Sounds to me like you would like to apply a signalling system to the electrical system, by analogy and have our kettles and so forth signal their usage etcetera, and put toll booths in there.

What we're leaning towards, the whole network neutrality debate. Should your power company be able to say "Well, you're British, you live off tea. Without tea you'd perish. So, we're going to charge you lots of money for kettles. But perhaps this house heating, well the Brits are pretty used to living in the cold and damp. They won't notice much if their houses are still cold and damp. We won't charge them very much for heating the house by electrical power." 

If you only had a choice of one supplier, then that would be a bad thing. Because it would allow them to price discriminate amongst all the different uses you have and basically reclaim all the value of electricity for themselves. In a competitive market, it would be a good thing. Now it seems utterly bizarre to think of having to provision a device before you plug it into the power socket, but if you really wanted to manage your power usage better, or be able to go and compare a Bosch refrigerator. On the refrigerator there's the little EU mandated power efficiency chart. It turns out that basically all the refrigerators in the row all say "A", because in the six years since they started or ten years that they started to scheme, refrigerators have all got much more efficient. They all got to the top of the scale. There's nothing best on list tells me, really. . .

But they may never have got there had they not put this A-to-F label on there...

Imagine for a moment, I could go and buy a refrigerator and it came with twenty years of service and electricity included. I could see the full price, the lifetime price of that appliance there in front of me. I don't need to go and say, "That one is 700 pounds but it uses 22 kWh a year and this one..."  The whole thing would be bundled there in front of me.

It would be a good thing and a bad thing in the white goods appliance market, you could argue. But at least have the option. If the power socket was able to say, "Ah, the power going for this device is provisioned to this other account."

But for that to happen you have to have a very rich wholesale market in electricity for the refrigerator maker, to have a refrigerator work regardless of which power company you happen to have chosen as your retail provider for power, so you'd have to various intermediaries and a new market structure.

So then how do you stop them reclaiming all the value?

As long as there's competition at the retail end, so you have a choice...

But that's a major thing; "as long as there's competition."  Most of my American buddies are claiming there isn't competition, there's a duolopy in the US.

And they are right. There's a duolopy in the US. There are some pros and cons of that model. You ask the people who are in the lucky areas where Verizon FIOS has been deployed because the Verizon model said this is a zip code with a nice high income of people who pay their bills and would quite like to have lots of premium direct TV. Well it works to some degree. But unfortunately I think that it will also greatly inhibit the growth of the necessary economic models that will be needed in the future; particularly growth of rich wholesale markets in access and connectivity.

What will inhibit it?

The vertical industry structure you see in the USA; where AT&T and Verizon and a few other companies, dominate the market and you have very limited retails choice; you have choice of either one or two broadband ISP's.

Now the UK market has a thriving, vibrant wholesale market, France has a thriving wholesale market, as a foundation from which to grow new wholesale products, which would enable new kinds of connected appliance to be offered.

So you go out and you buy the Apple TV box and plug it in, you don't have to think about which broadband plan you're on, is it the right broadband plan and fast enough and enough megabytes and gigabytes per month?  It's Apple and it's the iTunes service that has to worry about getting the content onto the box and paying for it.

As long as you don't have a bottleneck in that little access loop stopping retail competition, then the network neutrality debate, this whole bogeyman is like a shadow on the floor. But, the shadow is actually something you want, which is a rich wholesale market.

The idea that Google will be charged extra for delivering YouTube videos, here's the secret, it's a good thing when Google could offer YouTube videos and you could sit there and watch them all day, every day in standard definition, high definition resolution or whatever you want, and Google is footing the bill for you. Today this isn't the case.

Martin, these things you mentioned in the start, sound to me are a double-edged sword. What could happen, excuse my instant pessimism, is that you'll get the same Google video quality but the telco will charge you 5 pence or 10 cents every time you watch a video.

The worst bogeyman fear with network neutrality is Google charging you; your ISP will be charging you to go into something you value highly. That isn't going to happen, it's not going to happen.

Why are you so sure please?

If there's going to be any charges, the charges are going to be to those upstream parties like Google [as opposed to downstream to the consumer]. It's going to be to the people like Microsoft for delivering your ...

It may just give you what you have today, that is the fear; that's where the anger, the sentiment is, which you may even be detecting from me.

But, it's [network neutrality] trying to treat the symptoms caused by a lack of competition in the access bottleneck. You can't cure cancer by giving people more morphine. It doesn't work that way. It seems to take the pain away, but you'll still die. 

In the US market, you need to understand the infrastructure is not part of the telecom industry, basically. The infrastructure is part of a multi-utility access business. Their job is to synchronize up the replacement of the gas pipe with a length of new fiber; all the replacement of older street lamps and the digging up of the road with deployment of the new fiber down the road and you do drops off the side. It's to take the cost out of the thing.

It's advertised over a twenty, thirty or whatever years. The plastic pipe itself might be there for 100 years. It's financed differently, maybe under different ownership structures that are designed to create open access and neutrality. If you want neutrality, neutrality needs to be a different layer [laughter]. It's not the IP layer. It's not layer three. Neutrality has to happen at layer zero and one. When you've got the rights of way and the conduits and the access ducts and maybe the physical fiber or copper, that's where the neutrality needs to occur. They picked the wrong place to go fight a battle. The good news is that if you started initiating network neutrality legislation, I don't think anyone could actually write anything down that would be meaningful and enforceable. So it's largely hot air.

Network neutrality means to me to sell me something called Internet, let me shunt bits backwards and forwards, and don't discriminate those bits in terms of pricing. Is that not something simple?

Let us understand this right. You'd have broadband service providers, people who are selling access to a broadband pipe, and within that today, most of their money comes from offering the Internet product through ISP. Now, within that product, there's clearly a problem today, which is that some or many users have been misled as to what they're being sold. They've been told unlimited, asterisk. What the asterisk says is not unlimited. They've been told Internet access and in practice they're finding that certain protocols and certain destinations are being throttled. It's the mismatch between what the consumers been told and what the reality is, that's the problem; not that less traffic should have been going on.

The evidence of that is that there are ISP's like PlusNet in the UK, who are brutally honest with their customers. They have whole web pages dedicated to saying, "Here's how we're going about shaping our traffic today."  They publish all their current traffic stats on their website day by day. They tell you when you buy the thing, "Hey, we traffic shape and we love it."

If the user buys it, they have their eyes open. They know what's happening; where is the problem? It's between consenting adults?  The problem occurs, much in the market. People's ISP contracts have this clause that "we can do whatever we like whenever we like without telling you about it."  That's wrong.

There's a consumer protection issue there. That was like Michael Powell's "Fourth Freedom", freedom to know what's in the plan. That isn't currently being enforced. You could call it net neutrality, the neutrality of the network, but can you have a very un-neutral ISP plan if you want to, like PlusNet's. It's absolutely fine as long as the user knows about it; is told about it before they buy it.

What it also ignores is that outside of the ISP product, you look at all the other products that the broadband service provider could be offering, all these other wholesale products to say, "We will give you universal access to all government self-service websites..."

Also, if a doctor goes to any person's house and plugs in a different little modem into the phone socket, they will be provisioned to have broadband access while they're at that patient's house, regardless of whether grandma has actually got broadband herself.

So there could be all kinds of other products and services that the broadband service provider offers, which the neutrality thing is irrelevant to. The government or the National Health Service goes out and buys these business-to-business products. Where's the problem? You have professionals buying off professionals. They should know exactly what they're buying and know how to buy it.

You informed me that you've recently published under STL Partners; telco2.net - I think is the best place to look for the STL Partners work, am I right there?  You've recently published a future of broadband report?

We've just finished a six month study on the future of broadband, the future business models of broadband. To do that we did an online survey, which over eight-hundred people responded. We've talked to dozens and dozens of people. We did a lot of in-depth research. We have been comparing the broadband industry to other industries like container shipping, and the power distribution industry. We've been trying to learn the lessons, what we can, from these other industries and answer what does it mean for broadband?

Our conclusions are very much what I've been describing, that is, broadband is part of a multi-network, data logistics business. It doesn't exist in isolation. You have to be able blend together multiple different distribution systems. If you're offering an IPTV, for example some kind of enhanced TV service, you ought to have voting. Then that voting might be done by SMS and actually, if in your little set up box you captured a person's mobile phone number, and authenticate it, they may not even necessarily need to send the message directly from their mobile phone. There are all kinds of different ways of blending together these different systems.

Does that not mean that you're saying broadband providers should start going out and buying postal offices and courier vans and jiffy bags?

Yes, it's the digital equivalent to these. What they need to have is they need to get involved in content delivery networks so there is bulk content, that is not time sensitive. It needs to be cached somewhere in the network. Today, companies like Akamai put their caches in a more centralized locations, but you don't find these caches inside of every DSLAM inside every central office. They cache stuff at the edge of the networks, on your PC, in the set up box, in the home hub, and these go on to bridge different systems so it would be able to have BT Vision box where you can take freeview broadcast TV and cache that. You would be able to take broadband and broadcast and these other systems and be able to meld them together into new things.

They also need to deal with we may call the customs aspect of being a logistics provider. So when shipping sea containers around the world, you have these weight bills and manifests and you have to pay customs dues and stuff like that. The digital equivalent of that is being able to deal with authentication and provisioning for all these different networks and connectivity.

Another part of it is you take the postal analogies. You walk to the post office and at the back of the post office are all the counters where you go and post things. But normally, there are racks and racks or wrapping paper and letters and pens and all kinds of other things you need associated to the postal delivery. That's the value of the services. So on top of the basic logistics business, there are a number of value added services.

In the physical world you have insurance as an example of a value added service. In the digital world examples of value added services would be advert insertion, or quick checking;  so the telco knows where you live because they have a copper cable that goes to the front door, they have been receiving payment from you for a certain period and they know if it good debt or bad debt. Recently the biggest credit checking company in the UK is BT; they did more credit checks than anyone else. Yet, if you're running an application over a BT DSL line, you have no means at the moment of interacting with that very private and personal data.

So there are all these value added services - location, presence and other examples where the telco or broadband service provider is a supplier to people who are building these applications at the top of the network. They are doing things which are natural by products of running the network, a logistics business. They're not toll keepers getting in the way of people actually trying to build their application and deliver it. They're suppliers of the things that these people voluntarily draw on and pay for because they add value to their business, not because the telco's getting in the way.

So is it your position on net neutrality that it's a moot point?  Is that my understanding? 

Pretty much yes, because I've never managed to see a really meaningful definition of net neutrality. I've seen lots of high level superficial definitions, but when it comes to applying those ideas in practice, they're far too woolly and vague. It's just a name for a fear, not a name for a viable policy that any one regulation can adopt.

Have any networks ever been neutral? So when you download something over the Internet from Korea, some piece of content you want to download, and you think, "My goodness, it seems to be going down really fast." You download from outer Mongolia, you think, "Gee, it's going down really slowly." That's because of the really big fat pipe that goes to Korea and the really thin pipe that goes into outer Mongolia. That reflects the relative demand for those areas. You could then say, "It doesn't seem very neutral."  We're discriminating against the outer Mongolians. Well what is your the duty?  What is neutral?  What experience is supposed to be neutral that you're delivering to everyone?

If YouTube suddenly explodes in popularity and it is generating tons of transit costs to ISP's, are they suddenly under obligation to maintain a certain ping time and bandwidth through to YouTube when I go to the website?  What is this neutral thing [laughter], tell me?  Do we have to have regulators imbedded every router on the Internet saying, "I'm very sorry, but you can't route that that packet that way. The ping time is too long. It's not neutral." [laughter] The World of Warcraft players won't be happy.

The fear is being very well defined, the net neutrality fear; if you go to a website which isn't on your telco content partners, like their video partner or their news partner, if you go to a news site that isn't on their partner list, you're going to be charged for reading the news on that site. Is this not a well-placed fear?

If you lived in a market where there absolutely no choice as to which ISP you had, or there was very little choice such as the US, I guess it's possible that the Internet super highway man might then come along and rob you of your valuables as you go past and insist on an extra charge to let you pass.

But actually, what we want to see emerge is a rich wholesale market where Google could come along and say, "Hey, you want to watch YouTube or watch YouTube all day in standard or high definition without any charges and you don't have to worry about going over your fair usage limit or your set cap limit. It's all on us [laughter], keep on watching those adverts, keep on clicking on those little contextual ads. Here's the problem. The current ISP model tries to charge everyone the same amount for a very broad spread of actual usage. But you can't remedy that by going back to metered usage because people hate having a clock put on, and they don't understand megabytes and megabits stuff. You can't traffic shape your way around the problem because the users don't really understand advanced network policy enforcement; obviously there are a small segment of users who do. Some gaming users might be more than happy to be on an ISP that tries to prioritize certain real time flows or holds back peer to peer because they want to have priority in the network for the games.

But by and large, none of those things work out. So, the way to solve it is to take the voice and video traffic, take it out of the ISP product but to do it in a way that is beneficial to the user. The user actually wants it to happen. An example would be that you could watch YouTube videos until your eyeballs fall out because you know that it isn't costing you a dime. You can make phone calls from your mobile device to your work colleagues through your exchange server, to your prospective date through match.com and all these separate voice enabled applications just work and it's all charged back to the appropriate person; back to your employer or back to match.com.

Net neutrality fear is that a bogeymen will come a long a rob you. But the bogeyman really is just a shadow of something we actually want, which is a rich wholesale market.

You said at the start, that there isn't such a rich market in the United States. So their net neutrality fear is therefore very real then?

It's real in that there is a gap between what's being sold at retail by an ISP and what you're actually getting, that Comcast could suddenly come and decide that "we don't want to have this peer-to-peer traffic even though we sold you Internet access." But the solution to that is to restructure the industry so that users have retail competition. They have lots less people trying to compete for their business and if one of them turns out to be a two-faced liar, then you just don't renew with them, you go with somebody else.

That's not going to happen within the current US industry structure. The consequence is that probably the US will fall behind as an industry leader.

Have you given any consideration to open wirelessm, in the 700 MHz type stuff? 

It's very hard to make a call on some of these things because there are certain benefits to vertical integration. It helps to pull more money into the infrastructure layer. You cross-subsidize infrastructure from your overpriced application services because you can control what runs over the network. The problem is then you end up with a very stagnant set of services in the network because everything is gate-keepered by telco. Telco's idea of progress is not the same as everyone else's idea of progress.

So, superficially, open access is pretty attractive. But, it's really unclear how this tension between the commons of the network and the need for innovation and the need to be able to ration out a fixed amount of space is going be worked out. I'm really keen to see the experiment and I think the experiment should be well-run; there should be enough spectrum given enough open access rules. There are a number of different models, potentially. Something like WiFi, which was a bit of a free for as long as the power levels not too high, some were it's open access bits or wholesale; business to business types of transactions going on.

Lets see the experiment run because I don't think anyone is sufficiently clever to understand all the variables involved and how it will work out. Let's see the experiment run many times over in different places and learn from it. At the moment nobody really knows what the outcome will be.

I noticed that you were the only keynote speaker who still hasn't put a final title on his keynote [for 2008]. You haven't submitted any talk text. What are you going to speak about?  You hinted it was different distribution models?

What we've studying is how telecoms is just one of many distribution systems of data and how telco's can turn themselves into being logistic service providers for data. I've been doing a six month study on that.

I was procrastinating about what to talk about because I've also been thinking about the future of telephony, voice and personal messaging. Another option, which I won't talk about, was just how telephony and phone calls are just one layer in a nice, rich, thick five layer sandwich. The sandwich, the pyramid of these things, goes from the top where you have communities. There are a small number of communities which are made up of relationships, which are people. Below relationships you have conversations going on. You don't talk to someone for twenty years if you really don't have a relationship with them.

Yeah, communications are required to have a relationship, right.

The conversation is made up of things like phone calls. I think below phone calls is an interesting extra layer - rendezvous. Although some phone calls are being used to try and help organize the real phone call. There we find the real conversation. Not all the conversation occurs through telephony. Some of it occurs face to face. Some of it occurs through other media like email.

People are often phoning up to say, "I'll be there in five minutes, I'm just running a little bit late. I'm on the train."  There are all kinds of manual transfers of location and presence data, which are being done through telephony, but they aren't phone conversations in that sense. Today's telephony product is very broken in terms of helping people to meet up at convenient times. If I want a call with you, I can't just send through into your requested call list, like your missed calls on your mobile, "Martin would like to have a call with you. At your convenient time, call Martin back."  If I'm unavailable the message temporarily disappears on your phone. If you're on another call, it doesn't try to invite you to call me at the same time.

There's an opportunity to fix the whole rendezvous process. There's an option to fix the conversational process as well. For example, dictating your name, address and credit card number and security code during a conversation with a call center is very inconvenient and painful, whereas, you'd like to just press "1" to release that information.

I think there's a lot of opportunity in terms of money to be made in fixing the problems of telephony. But, in a fifteen minute keynote you couldn't talk about so much. I think I ought to focus on what the phone company becomes which is the logistics service provider for enabling the transport of personal communications data and generally get out of the way of running the phone business.

But you try to milk the existing phone business for all it's worth and help integrate it with all these other revenue generating businesses like ecommerce or vcommerce.

So, why are you coming to the inaugural Emerging Communications 2008 Conference, eComm, March 12-14, 2008, at the Computer History Museum, Mountain View, California?  Why are you coming along?  Why are you putting your ass on a plane in order to do a long haul flight to go over there?

I'll tell you, it isn't for the frequent flyer miles. It's because there's been quite a lot of talk recently about how VoIP has become boring and dull, there's no money in voice and voice is going to be free. That's rubbish and nonsense. It's a complete misunderstanding of the size of the opportunity and how voice and telephony and personal communications are the anchor in which the whole of the telecommunications industry revolves. Despite the fixation on media and entertainment, which seems to drag people off to false alleys all the time.

There's actually a huge amount of opportunity for telcos to turn themselves into platforms that are suppliers of personalization and rendezvous and authentication and payment, credit checking and all kinds of other data than enable conversations to occur. There would be a lot of money in doing this. It's part of the big picture of being the logistics service provider, which would help actually deliver stuff, but don't get in the way of whatever is in the packet.

It's also to share some ideas that we've had within the Telco 2.0 space and our understanding of two-sided business models and some of the key issues and concepts around that.

Plus, look at the speaker line-up. It's such a concentration of the top people in the industry. It was just irresistible to come.

When you said that voice or VoIP is not exciting, why do you say this?

That's what many of people are saying. I think it's because they've got trapped in the idea that the value is all in the media itself. It's in the Voice Over IP. Actually, the value is somewhere else. The value is in avoiding wasted phone calls, people making phone calls and getting to voice mail when they shouldn't get into voicemail.

They've [VoIP crowd]  focused on competing with the existing telephony system on the thing it does best, which is transferring media and not the things it does really badly, which is location, presence, all these other things.

I think voice is going to be an integral part of almost every online application in the future. There will always be other people to talk to. There will always be support and service to talk to. It's a massive opportunity.

Are you saying that voice will become an adjunct to other things of value?

Yes, but it will be done different ways. Not everything will be synchronise voice. There will be a lot more voice messaging going on. People want personal touch. They want to have a sense of the other person they are communicating with, because they hear their voice. But, people won't always necessarily want to have synchronise voice.

But today's voice mail, which is completely disjoined from all the other online activities you engage in, isn't the answer. If I want to send you a voice message without your phone ringing, and do it with and instant online application, how do I set it up so that it delivers at the right time?  If you are off on holiday half way around the world, it doesn't arrive at 3:00 a.m. and wake you up saying, "Beep, beep", and you open your phone, when it's not something urgent. 

I think voice will be a story of the evolution of the web in the next ten years. It probably isn't so much around semantic web all this other geek-friendly stuff. It's around the touchy-feely side of how do you label relationships, conversations, and human touch?  There ought to be a lot more of a woman's touch around some of these conferences; understanding the less logistic side of communications.

When you spoke of that pyramid with communications at the top, actually communities at the top, and relationships underneath and communications underneath that; can you relate that pyramid to social networking sites and telecommunications companies?

Social networking sites are the top three layers of the pyramid then there are communities, they are formed of relationships, and then there are conversations. You can find people, get model groups of people and you can send messages to people.

Phone companies are the bottom three layers of the pyramid, which overlap. They enable conversations. They enable calls, and they enable rendezvous. The rendezvous is that you're setting up a mutually convenient time. I text message you and say, "Call me when you're ready."  It's part of enabling the rendezvous.

These two people over lap, but they aren't necessarily conflicts. So should Facebook spend lots of money enabling voice in their applications? No because we already have mobile phones and desk phones and voice capabilities. The PC is a terrible telephone. Why make it into a telephone?  It's not. So how do you capture someone's mobile number or some other identifier for them and integrate their mobile voicemail with the Facebook voice messaging?  That's the problem it's going to solve.

How do you enable someone to make a phone call within Facebook to somebody else in a way that they can see that the other person is available and wants to talk at the moment and is in a certain context and location?

So in summary where do you see the opportunity in voice?

There is a number of parts. One of which is simply enabling new forms of minutes; new applications which will carry voice and don't necessarily do it using phone numbers or traditional means of telephony. Another one we might call vcommerce which is all the ways consumers interact with enterprises; so it's communications enabling business processes like delivering a parcel to your house and making sure the guy only comes when you are home. Some of it is around vcommerce type activities where you register your credit card number with your phone company or bank details and when you interact with the call center, there is non of this "Habla espanol?"  They know I speak English. It's in my telephony profile.

There is plenty money in enabling these experiences, there is plenty money in eliminating the waste in today's telephony.  Every time I spend minutes looking up someone's number, dialing them and finding it's voice mail, a minute of my time is worth more than the ten pence it cost me to make that call. Actually, a minute of my time, during the day, at billable rates is a lot more than the 10 pence call. If you can save me wasting that minute, trying to phone someone who isn't there, that's worth a lot more than the phone call is worth.

It seems that many people are still living off the ten-year old VoIP as an exciting thing when we don't care so much about the cost per minute of your call anymore, especially with a crash of TDM prices. You seem to be saying let's stop worrying or thinking it's an evolution to try and drive cost of calls down. The electrical path, the physical connectivity costs are nothing. It's really the cost at the social level. The cost of human time and attention seems to be where you're saying the cost is. This is where communications must aim at solving these wastages of human time and attention?

the rendezvous layer, the driver has been the increasing cost of human labor and time, compared to the cost of the phone call. Above the phone call layer, there is the conversation layer. It's mostly enabling better conversations between users and merchants.

I like this very much. You're saying it's not five nines of reliability that matter, unless you're calling emergency services. When you call to say, "I'm at the supermarket; do you want ketchup," you don't really care about five-nines of circuits, I assume is what you're saying?  What you care about is five-nines of successful communications, which mean you don't want to wake your baby up when you call about ketchup. Is this what you're saying?

Yes, at the moment my kids are off with my in-laws. They're two hours ahead of us. I'm not quite sure exactly when the kids are having their afternoon nap. They might still be on British time or on Eastern European time. The last thing I want to do is phone up my wife on the mobile when she's just trying to put one of the kids down to bed for their afternoon nap. What I do want to do is ask her to call me at some point in next half hour because I'm free now. I don't send a text message because that will make the phone go "beep, beep" and will suddenly make the child who is trying to fall asleep go, "What was that noise?" 

So I want better telephony. I want the phone company to help me realize that. To let me have spy holes as to what's going on at the other end of this line, before I press the green button, to make a phone call.

What is the opportunity space?  Is this a large financial opportunity space that you see?

Yes - have I modeled exactly how you do it?  If I had worked out exactly how to make money from it, I wouldn't tell you [laughter]. I'm pretty sure that there is a lot of money in it. Because everyone has been looking under the wrong stone for the last ten years. They've all been looking at how do we arbitrage the metered-minute model. It's just irrelevant. Almost all of the voice 2.0 start-up companies have been centered around this, with a few notable exceptions. It's the exceptions that are the ones that are going to be the seeds in the new business model of save users time, give them convenience.

Who do you think is best leveraged to seize these opportunities, this new land-grab?  Do you think it's the likes of Google or do you feel telcos also are going to play a major role in achieving this land-grab of the financial opportunity space?

A few telcos that open up in terms of application platforms will be successful. They'll be successful because they've turned themselves into logistic service providers for everyone else, not because they can stand in the way [laughter] of people delivering applications they want to deliver. I don't think we've really seen yet, the new raft of communications companies of the future. There are a few I've seen that I've been impressed with, like VoiceSage, who help enable communication business processes, how to integrate telco capabilities with general business processes.

But for the most part, I think these companies have yet to come into existence. The current social networking sites are based around entrapment of the users and trying to capture their personal data, resell it, and do it in the ways that I don't think users will allow them to monetize, ultimately. I think we're still in the early phase.

Social change requires a user attitude change. The Internet mass-market phenomenon is twelve years old, thirteen years old. Despite all the hype, it's still early days. Things don't actually change that fast. People's behavious don't change that fast. I think we've yet to really see the communications companies of the future, but hey come to eComm to start finding them. 

On that note, and especially as you're looking so tired, after sitting here for an hour and a half, chatting with myself, which we all very much appreciate. It's always a nice time to speak with you, Martin. I very much look forward, and I'm sure other people do also, to the half an hour keynote at eComm. I very much look forward to seeing you in Mountain View, California, Martin. Thank you very much for your time.

Thank you, Lee.

(Martin is also on schedule for the 2009 event to give a keynote entitled 'Where is the Money in Voice 2.0?')

Last month at the inaugural eComm we decided not to print a programme guide but instead to issue a PDF on a freebie USB keyring. The welcome note read:

We're honored that you joined us at for the first eComm conference. In doing so you've joined history in the making.

This community finds itself --quite suddenly-- in a new world of more open opportunity. Open handsets, open networks and open telecom platforms lend themselves to innovation in the worlds garages and bedrooms. And the signs are promising. Within the last 12 months many important events have occurred. First Apple released the iPhone, a phone running their computer operating system; a high school kid then spent the summer cracking the platform, hacking iPhones went critical, and finally Apple itself was forced to "blink", resulting with the release of an SDK. The FCC stated that the next big block of spectrum would only be auctioned to an open network and Google announced first that it was willing to spend billions to create universal access through wireless spectrum. Then Google announced Android, a new open phone operating system; T-Mobile and Sprint joined the Open Handset Alliance; and even Verizon and AT&T made PR releases about becoming open networks.

We believe a new era requires a new kind of conference. Previous industry talking to the industry type events have yielded nothing save consensual hallucinations. The gap between what telecom operators are doing (or allowing) and what the innovation community COULD do, and where end users are taking us is widening fast.

Communications innovation is being democratized. The winners will be those who embrace it. So welcome to eComm 2008. Let's all create an Emerging Communications Community capable of rethinking the trillion dollar industry together!

Lee Dryburgh
Founder, eComm Media

The following interview is with Dean Bubley who is the the Founder of Disruptive Analysis, an independent technology industry analyst and consulting firm. It took place on the 29th January 2008 - yes I know I am a little late getting it out the door! Dean will be delivering one of the keynotes at eComm next month.

Dean Bubley

The run time is 1 hour and 2 minutes.

Lee: So today I'm sitting -- I keep saying that actually, I'm sitting with blah-blah-blah, and I'm not sitting, because you're there and I'm here and we're on Skype. So today I'm chatting with Dean of Disruptive Wireless. Dean, can you tell me why you think eComm is important?

Dean: I think it's going to be a really interesting event, because every day I hear a huge amount about new and potential ways of using communication. And to be honest, I would rather filter them myself. As an analyst, my job is to try to wade through reams of possibilities, of pitches from all sorts of different companies, and being able to hear it outsourced and decide what I think is real, what I think is reasonable and what I think is unrealistic is very valuable. And I think it should be a fascinating events to actually see things put into context against each other. And there may well be a bunch of things which surprise me, positively and negatively maybe.

Lee: Okay. So, Dean, you're coming along as some kind of filtering critic, then. So I look forward to that. You are going to be speaking on a topic entitled "Who Controls Wireless Access: Carriers, Internet Players or the End User?" Can you give me a very brief outline of that?

Dean: Yeah. I mean, essentially this is looking at the realistic change for some of the more utopian ideals of mobile and wireless communications to become real.

Why utopian? I mean, there are an awful lot of people who refer to openness, who are looking to regain control of their own sort of mobility rather than leaving it in the hands of licensed mobile operators and carriers.

And up to a point, I can certainly understand why that's desirable; it's never good to have an unnecessary middleman between you and what you want to achieve.

On the other hand, we're in a practical hand. There are areas where services make sense. There are areas where things like licensed spectrum make sense, as well as unlicensed spectrum.

The fact is that the world has benefitted from several billion people using cellular telephony, for example, despite the fact that it's being controlled in a fairly rigorous way by the mobile operators. An interesting question is whether that will continue as you go forward with the advent of new wireless technologies, whether it's Wi-Fi meshes or WiMAX and various 4G and 3.5G technologies coming fairly soon. And then on further on the horizon, you've got things like software-defined radio. And there's a whole set of issues around policy, technology, end-user behavior and regulation, all of which intersect to determine what the mix is going to be of personal control versus perhaps carrier control. And then, of course, you've got also the Googles of this world coming into the marketplace, as well.

Lee: Well, when I listen to that, I hear two things. Carrier control, to me at least, means investment in networks. Now, we have a global, ubiquitous GSM network. I can be reached anywhere on one number, huge value. But at the same time, the application has remained static. As I think Norman said the other day, voice has pretty much followed the same paradigm the past 100 years and the huge disappointment, frustration and, to be honest, anger, has been the lack of innovation. And if the operators keep control of that access network, then the problem is, innovation will remain stifled. So do you feel that - I need to watch here knowing the consulting work you do -- can you comment on, as you called it, the middleman stiffling innovation there, the mobile operator?

Dean: Well, I think first is, you need to separate out the access from the core and the applications. I think that as long as there is sufficient competition in the access network, you will tend to get increasing levels of openness, and indeed this is what you're seeing now. In a lot of countries, there are now flat-rate data plans, you're seeing the opportunity to use 3.5G to LGs like HSPA, Wi-Fi, perhaps WiMAX in some countries, multiple operators; and there you tend to find that you will see access become more open. In some places, it will need a bit of a regulatory kick. And certainly there are enough places now that you can just use a mobile-operator service to get to whatever capabilities you want, whether on the web, in a corporate network or in the operator's own domain if they have a particularly good service.

Now, what you also then have though is openness on the device side and in the core and application layer. I'll talk about the device layer in a minute, but the core and application later, there is clearly a lack of innovation and sort of the proposed solution of IMS, if anything, exacerbates the problem in my view. It's very, very difficult for innovators to develop to IMS as a platform in the way that they do for the web. There are lots of interoperability issues; model of the standards are there. The idea of two men and a dog in a garage somewhere is more likely two men and a dog and a thirty-person legal department if you want to get a service adopted across multiple networks.

So I think that there's certainly some issues there. And to be fair, the carriers themselves are recognizing limitations. It's notable that IMS has had very little traction among cellular operators thus far, because they don't understand what the business model is. You know, frankly, voice works fine on circuit switched in most cases. And other things like IM and video-sharing are sort of almost prototype applications rather than revenue-generating ones.

So I think there is definitely a gap for innovation. Interestingly, some of the operators, the more forward-thinking ones, are looking to enable that by perhaps exposing their communication capabilities as APIs to third parties. I'm thinking about BT playing around with a thing called Web 21C and the Canadian operator Telus and others who are at the early stages of this. But it is early days.

It's also worth saying that on the device side, there is an interesting tousle around openness of devices. Some mobile phones are locked to a specific carrier. It varies hugely around the world, though. Roughly 50% of phones are sold through carrier channels or are carrier customized, and about 50% are sold separately. So if you go to parts of Asia, for example, you'll buy your SIM card from one shop and your handset from another. In North America and Japan and Korea and, to a lesser degree, Western Europe, that's historically not been the case, especially where handsets are subsidized, if you want to use that word, by the carrier. You could make an argument that if you're give a subsidized phone, it gives the person doing the subsidy, the operator, some sort of legal or moral authority to limit what you can do with it, whereas if they basically said, "Well, if you want to pay full price for the phone, then you can use it how you like; but if you want a free one, then you use it on our terms."

So I think we're going to see some interesting developments over the next 18 months here with a lot of carriers at least appearing to support greater levels of openness.

Lee: Okay. It reminds me of the comment that Martin Gaddis made about the Amazon book reader [Kindle], that it comes with connectivity and it's --

Dean: Yes.

Lee: -- pretty much an application tethered to connectivity and an application --

Dean: Hmm!

Lee: -- pretty much the same way voice and SMS are connected; you know, it comes with --

Dean: Yes.

Lee: -- connectivity and the apps. So if we subsidize a handset, the argument can be made to some degree that we can dictate what applications run. So I think you're correct in the use of the word "tousled" there.

As an end user, I want to see the explosion of innovation we saw in the '90s around the World Wide Web and the PC, and I want to see that end up in a handset, because a handset has far more opportunities because it's on you all the time, it's a personal device and all the other things that we know and I won't elaborate on.

Dean: Yeah. I agree in principle that there ought to be a mechanism for the type of viral adoption of cool new stuff that we see on the web. If you think about the first time you saw Google Earth, Facebook or whatever your favorite thing is. You probably on something like Google Earth, if you're like me, you probably wasted about three hours playing around with it and then emailed it to your friends, irrespective of what service provider they have, you emailed them "You need to get this now." And the thing is, there's no way you can do that in mobile at the moment.

You can't come across something cool and then tell your friends about it, because you think, "Well, what phone have they got? What network are they on? Are they on 3G, are they on 2G? Are they on CDMA, are they on GSM?" and so on. That mechanism for viral adoption isn't there. The mobile phone isn't the vector for the virus [sic: viral adoption] yet.

Now, that's partly down to the operators; but to be honest, it's also partly down to the nature of the handsets. There is huge fragmentation in handset operating systems. I've got a 3G phone where I've switched the 3G off on it to save battery, for example.

It's very difficult to predict what everyone else's capabilities are, and that makes it very difficult for innovators.

Lee: So it may be jumping ahead in what I wanted to cover with you. But are you able at this point to pass on any comment on the Open Handset Alliance's Android?

Dean: I have to say I haven't had as much information about how they're going to achieve what they want to achieve as I would've liked. I think to me at the moment, it's not much further beyond the stages of yet another platform in my eyes. Yes, I know it's Google, so you have to make allowances; but you essentially are dealing with a company which is run by idealists with lots of money, so they're in a position to make things happen. And it does seem to get support from a lot of people. But on the other hand, for that matter, so does Symbian and so does Linux and various other platforms for handsets, and fundamentally you can't escape the fact that 35% of the world's phones are based on plain, old Nokia Series 40 feature-phone platform. And it seems that large chunks of the world are quite happy with with very, very closed phones, not even like lock-down Smart phones, but basic phones which do voice, SMS and have an alarm clock.

Lee: (Laughing.) Dean, you always make me laugh. So

Dean: Yeah?

Lee: when you spoke, picking up on an earlier point you had that you touched across, can we go on the record and say, "Dean says that IMS is dead in the water"?

Dean: No, I don't think it is dead in the water. I think it's certainly not being deployed in the way that it was first envisaged by the 3GPP. It's deeply ironic that, in fact, the early implementations of IMS have not been mobile at all, but have been used for fixed voice over IP and also by some greenfield WiMAX operators. That's certainly not what 3GPP had in mind when they standardized it.

Bits of IMS are being deployed for certain things for certain operators. It makes sense in terms of consolidation of core networks. If you're an operator that's historically on multiple IP networks and you want to blend them all into one, it's an off-the-shelf blueprint about how to do it, and that may be easier than starting with a blank sheet of paper.

But there are certain elements of IMS which are not fully standardized or people haven't decided how to use them, say, particularly there's an element called the HSS, which is the subscriber data store, and at the moment that's not going anywhere very quickly. Conversely, some of the security functions and just some of the ways they sort of scale up session-based services, there are some upsides. But I certainly think the original IMS vision certainly has undergone an awful lot of rework.

So I wouldn't say it's dead in the water.

But it's sort of morphing into the more general web services, IP and IT space. I think if we come back in two or three years' time, there will be bits of network elements which are identifiably IMS elements; but I don't think we'll see too many people with a complete end-to-end IMS here and particularly not a standalone IMS.

You'll find that people are blending applications from a variety of sources. So essentially you've got Internet applications, you've got enterprise applications, IMS, you have maybe TV, old 2G and intelligent-network stuff which still works and various other sources, service/delivery platforms, and they're all having to be blended in some sort of network middleware with gateways here and sort of other interoperability platforms there. So I think we'll end up with a real mix at the end, to be honest, but not pure IMS.

Lee: You just said that the home subscriber server is not going anywhere, and yet it's the essential IMS component, would you not agree?

Dean: No, I wouldn't say it's an essential IMS component. The issue is that the HSS, no one is really sure what data you want to store in there, whether it's going to be centralized and distributed. If you think in some scenarios, if you were going to run every piece of subscriber data, you'd have things like people with mobile TV, there's useful information about how often they switch channels; but do you really want to create some huge data warehouse which has everything from your address and your billing details right through to just sort of whether you flip between adverts in the break on a mobile TV or sort of what the search terms are on the web or just too much subscriber data. And different applications want access to different subsets of it, and so it's almost impossible to try and standardize what would go in an HSS and what would go elsewhere.

Lee: Okay. I see how it's a huge obstacle personally to standardize what's in it, and from what I had heard you can't even put small amounts of data in it, because nobody would agree to extend it at all. People have been lobbying for that now because not even small amounts could be added in a custom fashion, too.

Dean: Well, it's one of those areas that's horribly political, and I think that's one of the reasons why, if you like, the full IMS is slow. That is one of them. There are some other issues around things like prepaid billing or online charging, it's called. There's issues about interoperability between IMS and non-IMS applications.

There's something that I've done a little research on around the lack of IMS handsets and the lack of IMS handset standards or specifications.

So as I said, there's pieces of the puzzle which are there and which are useful. I don't think the whole thing is going to disappear; but at the same time, the original vision of IMS doesn't appear to be realistic unless perhaps you're a greenfield operator or an operator which has such tight control over its own ecosystem that they can enforce whatever they happen to like without worrying too much about interoperability and standardization.

Lee: I'm going to ask you hopefully for a yes or a no answer to this.

Dean: (Laughing.)

Lee: Is IMS a telco savior in terms of ensuring continuing revenue far into the future?

Dean: No. I think that it's possibly a telco savior in terms of costs and cost management, though. If you look at the way that, say, BT positioned its business case for 21CN, its next-gen network, which isn't quite IMS, but it's sort of IMS-ish, certainly the way they've positioned it in the financial market is ... I can'tremember exact numbers, but roughly speaking it'll cost us £10 billion pounds and it'll save us £1 billion pounds a year in OpEx. Anything we get on top of that in new-services revenue is a bonus --

Lee: I have to add in, it doesn't use IMS.

Dean: Yeah. I'm paraphrasing Lee, that type of ... there is an argument that some form of IP NGN to carriers is essential to manage costs.

Lee: NGNs don't need any IMS standards.

Dean: They don't need any; but what I think you're seeing is that an increasing number of them are IMS-like. So you do have organizations like TISPAN, ETSI TISPAN, which is converging the 3GPP view of what constitutes an NGN. And it will be different in certain areas. But I still think that the underlying trend is towards some form of standardized IP architecture which is suitable for carrier business models. And on top of that, there will be also overlaid more Internet web services-like approaches to business.

Lee: Okay. So what I was supposed to be asking you about today was about wireless technologies. I did'nt intend to get stuck into the IMS thing; but as you know it's a major point, because it's really a hinge point, a lynchpin, actually, of the traditional telecoms industry.

Dean: Hmm.

Lee: So I've been meaning to ask you about the wireless technologies.

Dean: Yes.

Lee: You know about WiMAX, LTE, you know, Long-Term Evolution; Wi-Fi mesh, 4G, UWB, software-defined radio, High-Speed Data Packet Access and so on.

Dean: Yeah.

Lee: So would you just do a sweep of those technologies?

Dean: Right, okay. And this is going to be sort of a personal and Disruptive Analysis view of the world. Okay, WiMAX start off. WiMAX seems to go through waves roughly every three to four months of optimism and pessimism of the, oh, yes, it is; oh, no, it isn't.

My general view is, WiMAX will be important for non-phone devices, and so I'm thinking here of devices that might be PDA-type, they might be PCs, they might be games consoles; roughly speaking, things with large screens and large batteries.

The big question around WiMAX is around spectrum availability and how much spectrum and what type of spectrum it can use. In the U.S., you have 2.5 gigahertz. In various parts of the world you have 3.5 and maybe 2.5, which are great for fixed or outdoor uses, but have a problem and don't go through walls very well. So either need to have some sort of indoor-coverage solution like a femtocell or revert to Wi-Fi indoors, and that's an issue.

LTE, Long-Term Evolution, seems to be coming out as the medium- to long-term winner in this sort of war in what we generally call the pseudo-4G stakes. At the moment, there are no official 4G technologies, because it hasn't been defined yet; but there's lots of both marketing 4G and also what might be termed real candidate technologies for 4G, to be considered for 4G status. An LTE is probably the frontrunner there.

There's a lot of tests ongoing. LTE in theory offers extremely high speeds and efficiencies coupled with mobile operators working on a thing called NGMN, Next Generation Mobile Network. They appear to be trying to sort some of the ecosystem problems upfront so that both the network and the handsets and the transport infrastructure are all being developed at the same time. I'm expecting it to start appearing commercially in maybe one or two things at the end of 2010 with bigger pickup in 2012, 2013. It's not going to be easy, though, and I think there's going to be a lot of challenges that crop up in the early sort of trials and test beds that need to be fixed.

Wi-Fi mesh, I've been a deep skeptic of Metro Wi-Fi, in particular, for the last couple of years. I just don't see it as a useful medium for anything other than fairly boring applications like municipal collection of traffic-warden data or maybe CTTV cameras.

There will be some uses for it, but I don't think it's going to be around person-to-person communications. You've got a big problem with Wi-Fi meshes that Wi-Fi meshes tend to be outdoors and, once again, you have an issue of the outdoor network and the indoor network don't play together very nicely.

4G, as I said, I mean, at the moment there's lot of things using the term 4G; no one actually has precisely defined what it constitutes, but roughly speaking, I mean, anything that crops up from 2012 onwards, really.

I think there's a lot of challenges with the radio network, again on spectrum issues and these handset issues that need to be resolved. And I think initially it will be data applications, although interestingly you also run into the issue that any voice on 4G has to be Voice over IP because it's expected that they will be all IP networks.

UWB, Ultra-Wireless Broadband if I remember the acronym correctly, is one of those things that people talked about for a while. My understanding is that it's most likely manifestation is going to be in short-range communications, a sort of very far Bluetooth type use case.

At the moment, it seems to be going very safely. It's not something that people are talking to me about very much at all. I can see it having relevance perhaps in the home for distributing video signals around the home and, as I said, this sort of more familiar Bluetooth-type usage caters or sharing data between devices. I don't see it as a wide-era technology.

Software-defined radio is one of those things which needs to be defined itself rather more carefully. In theory, you have a chip on a handset or in the network which can reconfigure itself to deal with multiple protocols, multiple technologies, multiple bands; but it's not as easy as that.

Firstly, that tends to use a lot of power. Secondly, you have a whole range of issues to do with regulation, tests and measurements and sort of what are the protocols by which the software defines new radio types. How can you be sure that a given radio type is permissible in a given country, or is it licensed or unlicensed spectrum? You see SDR used in military radios, and I suspect you'll start seeing it in the mobile infrastructure first where power is not so much of an issue. I have my doubts whether it will appear in its full inclination on handsets for quite some time, although you might see certain components become a bit more configurable perhaps with the radio side of the handset first, where you've got maybe filters which can adjust their characteristics or amplifiers.

3.5G, whether it's sort of HSPA or the CDMA/EVDO, Rev A and beyond, they're the real world now. There is a rapid growth in the uses of 3.5G technologies, particularly for PC connectivity at the moment. There's a huge ramp-up of sales of things like 3G modems, either in some cases built into PCs, but increasingly just sold as a standalone HSDPA or HSUPA dongle USB modem. I know that they're growing incredibly quickly at the moment. And they're quite interesting, because to some extent your HSDPA is, if you like, the bug fix for 3G; it makes 3G work properly. You get reasonably good download speeds, you get quite decently low latency, depending on the spectrum used you get okay coverage. It's generally made 3G into a more day-to-day useable technology, and HSUPA and HSPA Plus will improve that still further.

As I say, the moment is mostly focused on PCs. Although there are a number of HSDPA handsets, even a handful of HSUPA handsets, they're pretty few and far between at the moment particularly in terms of being used in anger for anything other than occasional web browsing. I'm expecting this to change over the next few years as it starts to become more feasible and more desirable to run the Voice over IP over the 3G network. It's possible already, and there's a few operators who are playing around with it, as well, as well as a lot of separate standalone challenger software providers, things like Truphone and Skype and Fring. And I think that running VoIP over the 3G network becomes a lot better in terms of quality and in terms of spectrum efficiency with 3.5G and beyond.

Lee: Dean, for the purposes of those listening out-with the UK, because you're in the UK.

Dean: Yeah.

Lee: when you spoke about the Hutchison 3G and dongle there, how much do you pay a month for that?

Dean: I'm paying £15 pounds (~30 dollars) a month, including tax, for 3 gigabytes of data on a 12- month contract with a free modem.

Lee: Okay. And what speed, are you getting?

Dean: Well, it varies; depends where I am. Most of the time it's a couple hundred kilobits a second; but it gets up to about 800, 900 on good conditions. It's sufficient, I would say. Sometimes it drops down, particularly when I'm at my local Starbucks as a basement and it may vary, I'm lucky if I'm getting much more than 100 kilobits. But frankly, it is useable for most applications, and when I'm in good signal coverage, it's fine for, say, running Skype over.

Lee: Okay. And one of the HSDPA handsets I think everybody will know, a lot of people that have not heard of HSDPA --

is the Nokia N85, correct?

Lee: So, for example, I've got UK data SIM, as well, which I use when I am back there, and I pay 12 GBP a month, which is 24 US dollars a month; it's unlimited. And I actually get 1.8 meg in quite a few of the cities.

Dean: Well, that's good.

Lee: That means I can access the Google apps on my mobile phone, place voice calls over 3G free of charge around the world using Truphone
(00:30:07)
Dean: Hmm.

Lee: and I can also bluetooth it to the laptop for Internet access. So things are moving. But you had mentioned to me -- I may be going off topic; but you just informed me about your new roaming deal. Do you want to just mention that?

Dean: Yeah. I was going to say, actually, one of the things that Hutchison 3 does which is very unusual and which has caused quite a bit of consternation in the industry is, it doesn't charge a premium for data roaming. So I can use that modem when I want another Three [Hutchinson] network, and they have them in Denmark, Sweden, Italy, Austria, Hong Kong and Australia, without paying a roaming premium. And I think that that's a very interesting approach and one which I suspect doesn't sit very easily with a lot of the operators who are reliant on roaming charges both with voice and data as a source of margin.

Conversely, I've got a T-Mobile account, as well, and that charges me £7.50 GBP; that's $15 dollar per megabyte when I'm roaming, even when I'm going from the UK to Germany, their sort of home country. I imagine they have a huge fiber between the UK and Germany, but it still costs a huge amount. It's vastly cheaper to buy a satellite modem.

Lee: Okay, because I'd been speaking to Brough [Brough Turner] the other day and we'd been speaking about rip-off data-roaming rates harming the industry, and it's not just harming the industry. What we're doing is, we're blocking innovation, because you just can't stay on the Internet via your cell phone and be mobile at the same time.

Dean: There are some improvement in data roaming; but frankly, there's still one or two zeroes too much in there.

Lee: I wonder why we even have the concept of data roaming.

Dean: That's a very good question. A lot of it has to do with the actual structure of the cellular network where my understanding is that most of the data traffic will generally be back-hauled through to the home operator's infrastructure rather than breaking out onto the Internet locally. And I think the assumption there is, when it was designed was you would be using the operator's or your home operator's services rather than the real Internet. If you're just accessing the web, there's no reason why you shouldn't be able to sort of break out locally in whatever country you're in subject to maybe some content filtering or something, I guess.

Lee: So you've hit upon a key issue. Years ago, I had been arguing quite furiously about the whole concept of home-network operator's a very bad idea for everybody and that basically people want to build networks, well, they should have beacons offering you connectivity, and your device should be able to scan these, offer you connectivity options at set prices and you connect locally. This whole notion about back-hauling you off to some other country just because you took out a SIM card there I find quite appalling, but do you see any change in that direction?

Dean: Well, I suppose the largest change is going Wi-Fi, which has sort of proven that concept to a degree, perhaps not always with a greatest deal of user-friendliness, but you can and do use Wi-Fi on a PC from whoever the local providers are. I've also seen some movement ... one of the nice things about having the USB modems for PCs rather than the embedded 3G modems, which theoretically seem more elegant, is if you want to, you can buy another local one [SIM]. I know in some countries you can actually rent them for the duration of your stay, paying local prices.

Lee: Not exactly seamless.

Dean: It's not exactly seamless, no. But it is certainly some way towards that model. You may find that with WiMAX, you are also more able to. But the problem is, a lot of this would be contingent on the connection manager's software than your PC or in your phone, and that's an area which is lacking standards and it's also lacking at the moment the motivation of people to standardize. When you consider that a lot of particularly the phones are sell-through mobile operators, they're hardly likely to specify a software layer that allows you to use one of their local competitors in another country.

Lee: Okay. Do you think long term, we're going to can the notion of a home operator? If we can the notion of a home operator, that is huge structural, fundamental change within the industry. Do you see this happening long term?
(00:34:55)
Dean: Not easily. Maybe for some users. I mean, you've got to bear in mind that the majority of users don't roam that often. There is a slight difference in, say, North America, where you roam nationally outside of your operator's coverage areas. But we're talking about international roaming. Apart from business travelers and a few other frequent fliers, it's one of those annoyances which doesn't cause enough pain for the mass of consumers, and the pain it does occurs once or twice a year on holiday, frankly the best way to resolve that is probably through regulation rather than necessarily needing them to sort of select different operators each time they get off the plane. There's also a whole Lee of issues around numbering. It's fine if everyone uses a Skype ID or an email address or email number or whatever. But as long as we've got ordinary telephone numbers, there's a whole range of issues with how you get inbound calls.

Lee: Okay. So can you pass comment on let me begin this question again Dean. At the moment I'm playing with the Truphone who are going to be speaking [at eComm 2008], and I can pick up my cell phone and place a call to something like 1400 free of charge.

on my Nokia 85, I'll speak to the wireless-access point in the house and it gives me a very good quality call and I don't pay a thing and I'm calling landlines largely in the United States from Austria.

Lee: And when I'm in the UK when I'm using my data-roaming SIM there, I can just launch a call over 3G and be calling again to the States free of charge on my cell phone.

Lee: So how do you see these third-party Voice over IP over 3.5G players?

Dean: I see them becoming increasingly important both on a standalone basis and in partnership with the traditional carriers. As I said before, the traditional carriers ultimately have to go to Voice over IP if they want to do 4G; the question is how they get there and when they get there. And I would argue that one of the ways for them to gain experience of full mobile Voice over IP is to partner with people who are doing it already. There's a whole sort of range of reasons why that is.

Lee: Why do we care about a mobile IP?

Dean: Well, as I say, what do we care? You shouldn't necessarily as an end user need to care. The operators, as I say, firstly, they're going to be forced into it ultimately by 4G anyway.

Lee: But why do they have to go to 4G?

Dean: That's assuming ultimately we want to have higher and higher bandwidths and better capacity-utilization, spectrum is a finite resource. So if we want to have in theory mobile broadband and ever-faster mobile broadband, then we have to look at everywhere we can to optimize the spectrum we have access to. One way of doing it is using IP by using some of the essentially the sort of multiplexing characteristics and pushing intelligence down further into the radio network. Certainly once you get to a certain point, it is possible to get more voice calls per megahertz per cell with Voice over IP than it is with today's circuit switching.

Lee: Okay, because when I was at Hutchison, the bandwidth usage of VoIP was much greater than TDM, the bytes on the wire.

Dean: Yes, that has been the case. But certainly you have issues like packet overhead, which is true on the initial 3G networks. As you get to later generations of HSPA and then LTE, there is things like robust header compression, better packet scheduling and a range of other techniques in terms of, say, the receivers, which actually improves the spectrum efficiency above that of circuit switching. Sort of the crossover point comes around about HSPA with all of the sort of optional radio tweaks turned on, and then from then on there's a definite benefit.

Lee: Are we limited in processors and handsets to achieve that?

Dean: Yes, and by extension also power; however, one of the things there is the ability to optimize that, and it hasn't been explored. There's been a lot of activity over the last three years on optimizing Voice over IP over Wi-Fi on phones; but we're certainly not there on looking at the cellular side of packet voice yet. And one of the things that I'm aiming to perhaps try and capitalize is some more appreciation of the fact that that work needs to be done, and ideally it needs to be work done before the mobile industry is forced into it by LTE.
(00:40:28)
Lee: Okay. So I cut you off on commenting on third-party VoIP over 3G ...
the likes of Truphone.

Dean: Yeah. So I think that there's sort of certainly three or four companies that are well-known in that space: Truphone, Fring, Skype, some others like Challenger are doing it and a few more, as well.

Lee: But Skype is only on Windows Mobile, and Windows Mobile, am I allows saying, sucks very, very hard.

Dean: That's coming back to what I was saying before about --

Lee: I'm talking about my mobile.

Dean: Yes, but there's mobility, nomadicity. It depends on the use case. The way I see communications generally is, people are fragmenting the ways in which they communicate with other people, depending on their precise circumstances and preferences.

And so there is a valid-use case, which is if I am a mobile worker and I have a one-hour conference call where I want to call into a U.S. number, then I may well do that from a PC. And if that's the case, whether I'm using 3G or whether I'm using Wi-Fi, there is a usable ... actually, I prefer the PC for that type of call, because it means that, for example, I can look at a presentation on the screen, I can look at the website of the client, the customer or vendor that I'm talking to. So in those circumstances, you might well use a VoIP client on a PC by whatever bearer.

Conversely, for handsets, one of the things that I'm thinking about is whether you might want to blend Voice over IP with other applications. We're very early days on this, but certainly the general concept of mobile VoIP mashups is one that has been sort of mucking around quite a lot recently. At one level you can have voice inside a game; but it could also be social-networking oriented, it could be encrypted voice, it could be mobile voice as part of a corporate application. And so I think there's going to be some interesting innovation around that area over the next few years. I certainly don't expect it to suddenly account for a big chunk of the total number of voice minutes from a handset; but it could become an interesting share of the voice-over value, however you want to measure that.

Lee: As you say there, it may not end up being huge. Certainly in short term in terms of minutes, but you may find others enabling applications ...

Dean: Yes.

Lee: I don't want to use the word "converge", but including voice in them --

Dean: Yes.

Lee: -- which make a lot of value in those minutes.

Dean: Yeah, yeah. And at the moment, we're still really exploring those. It could be consumer applications; it could even be things like recording voice calls and using a phone as a dictaphone which might use this; it could be advertising-related. It could be customer service; it could be driven by business processes and enterprise applications. Now, in some of these cases, you could do things by circuit-switched, for instance, as well, if you had the appropriate APIs. But there are some things that will evolve that will be VoIP only. One very clever concept that someone suggested was around from a gaming point of view using stereo cues to locate people and so that you could potentially use Voice over IP with sort of all the other positioning technologies so you could hear your teammates behind you and to the right if you were wearing a headset, let's say.

Lee: Okay. Can you pass comment on 4G, what is it, when is it happening?

Dean: At the moment, what is it? At the moment, 4G is a marketing term used by all and sundry for different things; however, officially 4G will be a set of technologies defined and agreed by the ITU, the International Telecoms Union.

My understanding is that we're currently going through -- I haven't looked into the sort of the full regulatory process here -- is that we're going to go through a set of candidate technologies being proposed to be 4G based on some criteria. I'd imagine those are going to be LTE, perhaps the next version of WiMAX, which is 802.16M, I believe, and possibly CDMA/UMB, as well as maybe one or two others; there's possibly going to be a Chinese one and, you know, whatever else might come out of the woodwork. Now, that in theory will be sorted out, I guess, over the next year in terms of defining what is a 4G technology and what is not.

Then we have a whole range of issues around allocating spectrum for them, getting test technologies up and running. Rollout of networks, as I say, you might see a couple at the end of 2010; but I think they're sort of the big, round ramp up comes in 2012, 2013, 2014.

Lee: So our industry may have spent huge sums of money on 3G licenses, only to find itself quickly being run into 4G.

Dean: It sort of is; but one of the things I think you'll see, that 3G and 4G are starting to blend. Certainly from a spectrum point of view, you probably won't have dedicated 4G spectrum; you will have spectrum that's usable for 3- or for 4G. So I don't think there's going to be as definitive a cutoff as we saw with 2G/3G. I think people are going to be more migrating rather than trying to change everything overnight.

Lee: Who gets to play in the 4G game, then? Who gets access to that 4G spectrum?

Dean: Anyone with lots of money, I guess.

Lee: Will we see auctions again?

Dean: Yes, absolutely. I mean, I see auctions; I see the existing 3G operators being able to reuse their spectrum for 4G if they want. You're moving a lot of territories towards what's called spectrum neutrality or technology neutrality, where as a service writer you basically bid for spectrum and then within the constraints of what you're allowed to do in terms of interference and so on do what you like with it. If you want to deploy a 3G technology. oh, great. Want to deploy a 4G? Fine. And then you have to make a decision about the business models, about whether you can get multiple-mode devices which can cope with all of these, whether you've got a business case for the 3G only or 4G only, whether you want to do backwards compatibility to 2G, whether you want to do hybrids with Wi-Fi and WiMAX. It's going to be messy, and there's probably not going to be a single unifying theme there.

There's also a whole range of issues around the radio network, which needs to be looked into. I mean, particularly around the performance of things like beam forming and MIMO, which in theory are key elements of all the 4G radio technologies, but actually in reality are pretty poorly proven as a sort of scalable, mass-market, wide-area technologies.

I think one of the things that's going to crop up over the next ten years, and see if you can realize this, the RF stuff isn't as easy as they think, either because of interference or because of power issues.

Lee: Who thinks, Dean?

Dean: Well, a lot of the application providers and some of the network operators just think that we're going to end up with continually scaling mobile bandwidth, for example, and mobile capacity and that the phones will follow and everything will be good; it'll be like home broadband on the fixed network where you go from ADSL, to ADSL2, to ADSL2+ to VDSL. It's not as easy as that. And I was talking to a test vendor yesterday who is sort of raising issues around the performance of individual brands of handset, for example, HSDPA; and in fact, he only needs one like rogue handset with a poorly performing chip set to actually affect everyone else in that cell because of the way the radio networks are being designed. So it's one of those areas that's not as easy as it looks.

Lee: Okay. Now, you touched on open spectrum there, and I haven't had time to look into it because I've been so busy organizing this conference. But I gathered that the OFCOM, the UK regulator, was following the FCC in terms of planning to allocate open space; and if this is true, it also seemed that OFCOM was at odds with the European Union, who were more on fixing a spectrum to a particular application.

Dean: The European Union is also going down that route. OFCOM is one of the louder advocates of technology neutrality. There is a European Commission thing called WAPECS, which is around wireless-access policy, and that's a heavily contentious issue on how technology neutrality is brought in. I think it's one of those things that you were going to see, the regulation, legislation evolve over the next couple of years. Let's say the UK is one of the greater advocates of flexibility.

On the other hand, it's worth saying that I think some of the aspects haven't been fully explored, particularly a lot of the standards, say, some of the 3GPP-defined bands for things like UMTS have been defined and the conformance tests have been defined in the expectation of single-application spectrum. I don't think it's necessarily the case that there's been as much consideration given to the testing and conformance as standardization aspects, for one thing. I think it's possibly some of the standards are going to have to be gone over again and looked at to see whether the assumptions are still valid in the case of technology neutrality.

Lee: Okay. So I also heard and, again, I just haven't had the time to look at this, do you know if Google had been aiming at acquiring, or at least rumors of it, UK analogue TV spectrum when it becomes available over the next few years.

Dean: Well, I mean, I would imagine that Google, given its currently stated interest in the U.S. 700-megahertz options, I'm sure is looking at spectrum available elsewhere. It would be strange for Google to have a U.S.-only plan for spectrum, I think, even though the U.S. is obviously sort it's home market. So I'd certainly imagine that it is, particularly because there's also European Commission looking at whether it will be possible to run non-TV services in analog-TV spectrum using what's being referred to as the digital dividend. And certainly that's an area that the European Commission and the European regulatory communications agencies have been looking at.

Lee: Okay. So have you specifically heard these Google rumors towards the UK market?

Dean: No.

Lee: You haven't heard this.

Dean: No, I haven't heard this specifically; but it doesn't surprise me.

Lee: Okay.

Dean: Yeah, particularly because the [UK] TV spectrum is in the same general band as the U.S. 700 megahertz; and I can't remember the exact band that the analog TV is in, but it's something like 470 to 860 megahertz. So clearly, if Google was ... well, let's hypothesize that Google wins the spectrum in North America for 700 megahertz. If it could essentially reuse the same products in other markets, which also have approximately 700 megahertz frequencies, then clearly they'd want to look at that very hard.

Lee: The EU seems rather fragmented on this approach to spectrum allocations, so I wonder how easy it would be for them to move beyond the UK and acquire spectrum in the other European countries.

Dean: It would be patchy. Again, there are attempts in Europe to do a sort of a harmonization-lite is probably it; so it might be harmonization with exceptions, or it might be there are certain things which are optional, but the options are fixed. I don't think you're going to have the same situation as you do with GSM, where it's like 900 megahertz across the whole of Europe and 1800 [megahertz]. So I think it would be less clear-cut than that, but not the total free-for-all.

Lee: Okay. And I don't know too much on RF side, so do you mind me asking about the 700 megahertz and that particular frequency range. Is that rather low in terms of range?

Dean: Actually, in terms of range it's very good. Roughly speaking, the lower the frequency you get better range, you need lower power. It goes through walls better, but you get lower capacity.

Lee: Yeah, I had it backwards. So how limiting do you feel the bandwidth is there?

Dean: Well, it depends on how it's deployed. I mean, in theory you could have one 700-megahertz cell tower covering a huge area; but then it would be sharing comparatively small amounts of the spectrum for everyone in that area. Now, the other way you do it is, you try and combine it cleverly; so maybe you use your lower frequencies like 700 for rural areas, and you use higher frequencies in places where you've got more cell sites in town. Now, that then depends on whether you're starting from the position of having lots of cell sites like the incumbents or whether you're a new entrant like Google. So it's a very complicated set of criteria to try and optimize for. You also have for any given location, it's easier or cheaper or more expensive or more difficult to get hold of new cell sites. There may be regulations against it, or you may have problems with getting power and back-haul there. And then also you also have the possibility of doing all of this indoors using things like femtocells.

Lee: Okay. And we should wrap this up, so I wanted to drive towards this question. When can garage-based hackers -- you know, two men in a garage and a dog, as you put it -- put their attention on the radio side and get out with this, having their hands tied by mobile operators in order to actually innovate?

Dean: You could argue that the application there, you already can. If you're prepared to port across multiple different handset operating systems. In terms of when can you actually hack the radio network, I think that that will be a very long time coming in terms of you coming up with your own radio protocols and being able to play around with them. There is a finite amount of radio spectrum, and there is a risk of creating what's called the tragedy of the commons, where you let everyone do whatever they like and you create so much interference that everyone ends up with nothing. And so I don't think that we're gonna see regulators get out of the way on spectrum, possibly ever, although there are possibly grounds for having certain defined parts of spectrum as playgrounds for people to experiment with. But I certainly can't see the regulators sort of basically turning off regulation on 900 megahertz or the sort of main transmitters, not just for the communications reasons, because all the other stuff like military and radar and emergency services that need to be protected.

Lee: Leaving aside people being able to play about how they wish, how soon do you see people being able to engage with open spectrum in terms of, say, the likes of Google if it wins spectrum? Do you see this coming along more in the UK, more of this where the frequency has been won by somebody, but that somebody's committed towards making that open towards whatever they wish to achieve and let end users actually play on a piece of spectrum that they won?

Dean: I certainly see wholesale models becoming more prevalent, where you have maybe Google or someone else who builds out an infrastructure and then comes up with ways of wholesaling it to other service providers. I don't think that you would necessarily be able to do that down to the individual or developer level for a very long time. I mean, I think it could be quite difficult to have a sort of Google API for the radio network, where you essentially define your own capacity because of the need for physical infrastructure like cell sites. You know, there are a lot of constraints, both technically and commercially, for whoever is the spectrum operator.

Lee: Dean, can you tell us what is meant by open spectrum and what the opportunities are?

Dean: I have to say, it's not a term that I regularly hear. There are so many uses and misuses of the word "openness" in mobile at the moment. But I suspect it could be interpreted in a lot of different ways. I mean, what's your argument for that? What's your interpretation of "open spectrum"? What do you have in mind?

Lee: That you're free to experiment with applications at that frequency rather than be bound and committed legally to a given application.

Dean: Okay, I'll go another stage further down the rabbit hole. How are you defining "application", because, I mean, there are so many --

Lee: Voice.

Dean: Well, you already can. I mean, there's nothing stopping you doing that. I mean, we've already talked about open access or 2- or 3G networks. With an open device on essentially a flat-rate data plan, you can run whatever application you like. You're a little bit constrained on the quality of service, the coverage of whatever service provider you're using. But at application level within those constraints, you're free to play around. There are some operators that have restricted terms of service which say you can't do VoIP or you can't do Bit Torrent, and they may have packet inspection gear. But that's certainly not all of them, and within reason if you've got an application which runs over the top, whether it's social networking or whether it's ERP, you can run that.

Lee: Dean, are you able to pass comment on open spectrum defined as unlicensed spectrum that's for use by all, a commons type model?

Dean: Right. So there, you're talking about the equivalent of, say, 2.4 gigahertz, what used to be called the industrial, scientific and medical FM and there's a couple of other bands, as well, which is where Wi-Fi is, where as long as you conform to certain regulated characteristics in terms of sort of total power outputs and emissions into other bands, you can pretty much do what you like. Clearly, Wi-Fi in particular and various other models anything from garage-door openers to microwaves ovena have proven that there is value there. What there isn't at the moment is any particular concerted lobbying or regulatory effort to get more of that. It was interesting at the World Radio Congress at the end of 2007, there was very little noise that I heard about getting greater level of spectrum allocated for that type of purpose. I don't think it's been adequately proven that, say, the 2.4 band is too congested in most places or that other bands like 900 megahertz in the U.S. or I think various things in the 5-gigahertz range are now unusable. There doesn't appear to be any obvious political or regulatory motivation for extending it. I've asked a number of vendors and regulators before whether they liked to see more unlicensed spectrum, and the answer generally comes back, "We think there's enough."

Lee: Okay, Dean. Thank you very much for your time. I very much looking forward to seeing you next March in Mountain View at the Computer History Museum for the eComm, the Emerging Communications Conference. So again, thank you, Dean, and I will see you there.

One of my most favourite thinkers in the telecoms space is Martin Geddes who is a chief analyst at STL Partners. Martin also has a very well read blog humorously called Telepocalypse.

Because I see very strong value in Martin's opinions I asked him to keynote and to be on the advisory board for eComm 2008. And yesterday since I was in Edinburgh (Scotland) I decided to go round and do a pre-conference interview in person. We decided to aim for fifteen minutes but soon after hitting record we found that an hour and fifteen had passed. Now the word on the street is not to post interviews longer than the talk otherwise people will opt not to come to the conference! But I find it hard to believe that people could be so short-sighted, so I've decided to upload the whole thing. I've split it into two logical parts and will post the other half as a separate post.

2008-01-12-martin-geddes-part1-96.mp3

The run time is 54 minutes.

Below is some text to give you an idea without listening to the audio interview but it is by no means anywhere near a transcript nor full account of the interview (so please listen to it). Rather it is taken from notes I made in relation to points that interested me personally. I've also added hyperlinks where I believe they could be beneficial to understanding.

I started by asking him to tell me about the Telco 2.0 initiative to which he responded:

Telco 2.0 is about moving to a world where vertical integration of the telecoms industry is coming to an end and your seeing new industry structures emerge and it is how to remain profitable and alive in that environment

He made it clear that it is not only the applications themselves (voice and SMS) which are being horizontalized but the industry itself in a macro sense.

Martin also spoke at length about varying degrees of both vertical technical and commercial integration which results in different patterns of systems for distributing data to users. One of the examples he gave was:

...downloading a movie to watch on a iPod has a low level of technical vertical integration - the ISP does not know about the movie. But Apple may be paying CDNs to cache it, so there is some degree of commercial vertical integration. When looking to deliver voice, video and data, you can adjust the two axis of commercial and technical vertical integration

He went on to say that separating the application from the delivery mechanism which one would normally assume is a good thing, is not always good:

There is an utter total fixation on the broadband ISP product which is one where the applications have no access to the means of transferring money based on who is going to pay for delivering this movie, there is no API for hey Mr ISP...I will pay for it's delivery, don't count these bytes towards the users monthly usage cap, which is what the application provider would like....there are benefits from separating the applications from their delivery but also looses a lot in that process of the commercial richness of telephony and SMS and that is a problem

He then made a pertinent statement about the future of the Internet:

The future of the Internet and the future of broadband is largely about putting back into it some of the rich commercial models from other distribution and delivery systems like the fixed telephony PSTN system but without all the technical limitations of those old legacy systems

When I homed in on the net neutrality issue with the question:

you decide how many gigs you want, what speed you want, you purchase connectivity as a product, surely that should not be bound to the application, the applications you may or you may not pay for but these are separate things?

Martin responded:

there are a number of subtleties to that question...when we say connectivity what do we really mean? And there is two parts to that. One of which is getting the pure access part...how do I get from my mobile device to the cell tower...separately from that there is the question of getting the data across the world to wherever it needs to go. What we are seeing is the access component is relatively steady over time...the users do not like having to think about how many megabytes and megabits they need. So if you want to access the new BBC iPlayer online and your on Tesco value broadband, you've only got a 1 gigbyte usage limit in the month, the average user is not wanting to have to start thinking about the bit rate of the streaming video. All they want to know is either I am buying some product and it comes with postage and packing included or it is an add funded thing from something like YouTube and Google are paying for the whole delivery...and also they don't want to think about having to provision a new access everywhere they go, so when you go to your parents for Christmas...you really don't want all your usage at your parents house to be counted against your parents ISP plan because they might be on Tesco's value ISP broadband plan and not on the super business class version that you prefer. So we have to go work out how to package up the access, the data service itself and the application of devices in new  and different ways to sell the user exactly the thing they value and no more and no less. The best example around at the moment is Amazon's Kindle...this device will deliver you ebooks, you don't have to think about megabytes and megabits or whether it is provisioned, or hotspots...it just does it...it has been packaged up perfectly.

In relation to another application which is bound to the device and connectivity Martin states the SMS market last year was $100 billion dollars which is bigger than movies, music and computer gaming all put together.

for the few gigabytes worth of traffic that all of SMS adds up to, some small amount the users are paying some very very large amount of money but only if you view that purely from a very technical viewpoint. What that is telling us is a couple of things. One of which is that  when you brake apart a product into small pieces and sell it by the sachet rather than by the big bulk bottle,  you get much higher margins....another thing is that SMS is a distribution system for messages and data. And each of these distribution systems has a large number of attributes. One or two of which are what kind of technical data can it carry and how can you make payments thru it but it has a whole load of other attributes as well so for example the difference between SMS and the Internet is that SMS is based on phone numbers, phone numbers are attached to countries so for example if you are running the Eurovision song contest and you want people to be able to vote for songs, but they can not vote for songs from their own country well with SMS it is easy to filter out those votes....with the Internet you can not know with high certainly which country or jurisdiction  and ISP address is attached to and it is easy to go and fake it as well...it is only by understanding the full suite of attributes of these different distribution systems  and their cultural context and their expectations like telex has particularly laws, it has legal force in a way that other forms of communication maybe don't; fax only became a legal form of communication 10 or 15 years ago even though it existed for longer. So you need to look at the whole context of each of these different systems. The clever thing you can do with a telco or an application provider is blend together these different systems to create in effect new communications media. The impressive example at the moment is something like the Sky Anytime Box...it manages together broadcast and broadband...there are multiple ways of delivering the bits to the user...Sky have blended together the best of different distribution systems into a new one.

Ingeniously Martin has been thinking of the Internet as a means of signalling and coordination rather than always also the best means of delivery. Martin also steps into heretic waters by knocking the fixation with VoIP as a means for moving voice:

Netflix is using the Internet as a signalling system and the postal service as a bearer. And the postal service is a very efficient way of transferring tens or hundreds of gigabytes worth of data....the important lesson is that when you take this to where the cash is - the money is in voice - is that there has been this fixation with voice over IP for a number of years and actually, maybe and this is heresy but maybe the good old telephone system is really good at transferring voice. Hey time division multiplexing, does constant bit rate voice, real well! So you have to throw an awful lot of [VoIP] technology at a problem [voice quality/delivery] that does not exist to try and persuade anyone to move over to voice over IP. So it is only by understanding the full context and capabilities of each of these systems that you start to think hey actually the Internet is good at allowing new forms of signalling to evolve faster than what SS7 or whatever may have allowed...so why don't we focus on allowing the IP part to do what it does well which is how do we enable the rendezvous' in front of this phone call, how do we return signals and presence data and the little picture of where I am at, location information to help people make phone calls at the right time...stop worrying about trying to do voice over IP until the technology is super duper mature until we can not possibly afford to maintain two networks which is quite a long way away still and let the phone network do what it does well which is phone calls.

 When Martin said that I could not help but ask what he felt about 21CN: 

...if we just focus in on the voice part of the network itself...what I'd be tempted to do is look at how long from inception to delivery [of 21CN]...that is an awfully long time to be planning a technology project over, in this environment, and you could have built a wrapper around the existing voice network...and started to enabled lots of the "advanced services" that the 21CN would offer, years earlier, if you wanted to...you can see the allure of moving to an all IP network but you also have to understand the high risk of having any project that has 5-10 implementation time scales, where the protocol and architecture you are choosing may be obsolete by the time that you get to the end

SIP has been facing growing criticism and Martin picks up on that to prove his point (as SIP is a core protocol in BT's 21CN):

 if you look at something like SIP which was the obvious clear winner out of the IP signalling protocols, even that has got it's problems, it's got it's architectural mistakes, it's incompatibilities. It has been an absolute nightmare to get everyone to have an understanding of what a particular SIP message means...as a result the chances of  SIP itself being exposed to the application developer and being the interoperability layer, probably is not going to happen. SIP and IMS is good at provisioning the signalling to say hey Tom over here has paid a certain amount of money to have certain kinds of traffic being hauled over this network...it is good at saying hey lets manage some virtual circuit. What it isn't necessarily good at is trying to have a common understanding of what some presence message might mean in the future because it's all contextual to the user

Martin redefines what telcos are which is neither a dumb pipe nor an application provider:

let the signalling protocols do what they are good at which is help the telco be the logistics provider for data...personalized logistics providers for data, that is what telcos are. They haul data around from point A to point B but they do it using a number of means, so could be broadband, could be content delivery networks, edge caching. The telco provider is just like a logistics provider for atoms, blends together rail, sea, land and air transport...for voice you have prioritized networks vs best effort vs full circuit switched, packages it up with the applications and the device but does not get involved in the application itself. All they are doing is helping these people get data A to B, which isn't just being a dump pipe, it is a lot more complicated that just being a dump pipe because your having to slice and dice up that pipe and enable competing, contending uses of the pipe to be prioritized against each other to have much finer grained provisioning of the pipe...

When asked in relation to the electricity analogy - "is this not like saying that if you buy a kettle, someone else should be paying for the electricity that goes into the kettle" he responded:

When you post something there are all kinds of ways of deciding on who pays for the thing being posted, could be the person at either end....electricity distribution is like broadband and doesn't offer these different payment mechanisms and there are good reason for this. It could be good that each appliance has to account for its own usage. There are good reasons why the power network does not have this capability....power distribution is vertically integrated for a very good reason.

 Since it was clearly apparent that at least on the surface those positions seemed to differ extensively from what network neutrality folks appear to be advocating I steered the conversation closer and closer to the heart of that debate, to which Martin responded:

the whole network neutrality debate should your ISP ...price discriminate and reclaim all the value for themselves...there is a duopoly in the US and there are some pros and cons of that model. There are some lucky people in that model where Verizon FIOS has been deployed because the Verizon model says this is a zip code with higher income people who pay their bills...it works to some degree....it [network neutrality] will also greatly inhibit the growth of the necessary economic models that will be needed in the future, particularly the growth of rich wholesale markets in access and connectivity.

 Martin goes on to say what would be termed anti-network neutrality is in fact a good thing:

The vertical industry structure you see in the USA, where AT&T and Verizon and a few other companies dominate the market and you have limited retail choice, where you have the choice of one or two broadband ISPs. In the UK market there is a thriving, vibrant wholesale market. In France a thriving wholesale market, a foundation in which to grow new wholesale products which would enable new kinds of connected appliance, so you go out and buy the Apple TV box and plug it in and you don't have to think what broadband plan your on...the iTunes service has to worry about getting the content onto the box and paid for it. So as long as you do not have a bottleneck in that little access loop stopping retail competition then the network neutrality debate, this whole bogey man, is a shadow on the floor. The shadow is something you want, which is the rich wholesale market. The idea that Google will be charged extra for delivering YouTube videos, it's, here is the secret, a good thing! It is a good thing that Google could offer you YouTube videos and you can watch them all day, in standard def., in high def., and Google is footing the whole bill for you, which today isn't the case.

Due to fear of loosing that which I value (access to Internet sites without my telco/ISP trying to rob me on the way) I asked "excuse my instant pessimism, you will get the same Google video quality but the telco will charge you 5p or 10c everytime you watch a video?" Martin replied

the worst fear of network neutrality is that your ISP will be charging you to go to something that you value highly. That is'nt going to happen. It is'nt going to happen.

When asked why he was so sure the response was:

the charges are going to be to those upstream parties like Google, to people like Microsoft... it [network neutrality] is trying to treat the symptoms of a lack of competition caused by the access bottleneck. You can not cure cancer by giving people more morphine. It doesn't work that way. It seems to take the pain away but they still die. In the US market they need to understand that the infrastructure is not part of the telecoms industry, basically. The infrastructure is part of a more multi-utility access business and their job is synchronize up the replacement of the gas pipe with the laying of a new fibre...

Martin laid a further attack on network neutrality advocates stating:

if you want network neutrality, neutrality has to be a difference layer. It is not the IP layer, it is not layer 3. Neutrality has to happen at layers zero and one....They picked the wrong place to go and fight the battle. The good news is that if you started to initiating anti-network neutrality legislation, I don't think anyone could actually write anything down which would be meaningful and enforceable. So it is largely hot air and time not well spent.

 Knowing that STL have been working on a future of broadband report, I asked to know a little about it:

we've just finished a 6 month study on the future of broadband, future business models of broadband and to do that, we did an online survey which I know 800 respond, we've talked to dozens and dozens of people...we've been comparing broadband to the other industries like container shipping  and the power distribution industry  and we've been trying to learn the lessons we can from these other industries, what does it mean for broadband and our conclusions are very much along the lines of what I have been describing. Broadband is part of a multi-network data logistics business, it does not exist in isolation

Martin made the point that in the future we should expect to see a closer relationships between the applications and the networks in question:

the biggest credit checking company in the UK, is BT, yet if your running an application on a BT DSL line you have no means to interact with that personal private data. Location and presence are other examples...the telco or the broadband service provider is a provider to these people building these applications on top of the network and doing things which are natural by products of running a network, the logistics business

 When asked directly "is your position on network neutrality, that it is a moot point", the response was:

pretty much yes, because I've never managed to see a really meaningful definition of net neutrality. I've saw lots of high level superficial definitions but when it comes to applying those ideas in practice, there far too wholly and vague. So it's just a name for a fear rather than a viable policy that anyone in regulation can adopt. You can think about has any network been neutral?

 Back on the topic of ISPs he stated:

the current ISP model tries to charge everyone the same amount for a very broad spread of actual usage, you can not remedy that though by going back to metered usage as people hate having the clock put on, they don't understand the megabytes and megabits stuff and you cannot packet shape your way around the problem because the users don't really understand advanced network policy enforcement...the way to solve it is to take the voice and video traffic, take it out of the ISP product and do it in a way that is beneficial to the user...

 Making his point that network neutrality is just a name for a fear and little else:

the network neutrality fear is that his bogey man is going to come along and rob you. The bogey man really just is a shadow of something we actually want which is a rich wholesale market.

 When challenged with "but you said right at the start that there is not such a rich market in the United States, so the network neutrality fear is therefore very real then, surely?" Martin passed comment on the future of the US broadband industry:

It's real in that there is a gap between what people are being sold at retail by an ISP and what they are actually getting. Comcast can suddenly come along and decide they do not want to have this peer-to-peer traffic even though they sold you Internet access but the solution to that is to restructure the industry, so users have retail competition and have lots and lots of people trying to compete for their business and whoever turns out to be a two faced liar, you just don't renew with them and go with somebody else. Now that is not going to happen within the current US industry structure and the consequences are that probably the US will fall behind as an industry leader 

Finally I could not help but bring into the interview a topic which has been very much on my mind by asking "have you given any consideration to open wireless? As in the 700Mhz type stuff?" to which Martin replied:

there are certain benefits to vertical integration in that it helps to pull more money into the infrastructure layer, you cross subsidize from your over priced application services because you can control what runs over the network. The problem then is that you end up with a very stagnant sort of services network because everything is gate-keepered by a telco and the telcos idea of progress is not the same as everyone else's. Superficially open access is very attractive but it is really unclear how the contention between the commons of the network and the need for innovation and the need to ration out a fixed amount of space is going to work out. So I am really keen to see the experiment and I think the experiment should be well run. There should be enough spectrum given out over to open access rules. There is a number of different models, potentially, so something like WiFi which is a bit of free for all so long as your power level is not too high. Some where it is open access, where it is all wholesale and business to business type transactions. So lets see the experiment run. I don't think anyone is sufficiently clever to understand all the variables involved, so let's see the experiment run in many different places as I don't think anyone knows what the outcome is going to be.