David Isenberg is talking about what’s happening in the world of telecommunications. He’s just back (two nights ago) from several weeks in Japan, Australian and New Zealand so he’s full of wide-eyed news of a world where broadband flows like milk and is as sweet as honey. Now he’s talking about a vanilla 802.11b system that provides better quality sound than “real” telephones.

“What HTTP did for documents, SIP (Session Initiation Protocol) will do for communications.”

“The best network is a stupid network.” That is, the best network provides nothing but connection. The services are provided by applications running on the network. (David and I wrote about this at The Paradox of the Best Network. All content came from David.) “Each of us in 2-3 years can have the bandwidth of a telephone company for a few thousand bucks. But the telephone companies believe in scarcity and are forcing it on us.”

The End to End principle, which is basically the same as The Stupid Network, says that you should keep the network simple because that preserves your options for innovating on its edges. Phone companies like to add value to their networks, for competitive reasons, which makes their networks smart. That’s fine for telephone calls, but the Internet is not specifically for phone calls or for anything else.

The Internet, says David, makes telephony just another application. This is a problem for the business model of the telephone company, for the telcos know about stringing wires and optimizing telephone switches (an expense) and make money selling the application for monthly revenues. In a stupid network, the application provides revenue. But, asks David, where’s the business model for the physical layer of the Internet? In short, who builds and runs the new network? Not the telephone companies because it’s too foreign from their business model. The cable companies are unlikely because they don’t want to enable the wholesale generation and sharing of entertainment that competes with the entertainment they’re selling. Municipalities? Sometimes. Utilities? Maybe. New companies? Customers?

There are, he notes, important political implications and obstacles. But he’s out of time.

Smart presentation on the virtues of stupid networks. But, then, I’m partial to David. I’ve learned a lot from him. (His newsletter is free and always excellent.)

Categories: Uncategorized dw