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October 19, 2004
The Next Billion conference raised one question above all others (and thanks to Ethan Zuckerman for pointing this out): Will the companies feeding the world its first billion cell phones be the ones to provide the next billion? The answer seems to be no; the markets and its needs and the necessary business models are just too different.
October 18, 2004
I was on a panel with Ethan Zuckerman and Colin Maclay (moderated by John Palfrey) about the obstacles to spreading VoIP connectivity. We spent most of our time talking about Ethan’s opening statement in which he said that if you want to get VoIP into developing nations, you’re probably going to have to compromise a little. For example, he’s proposed to Ghana that they tax calls outside of the country in order to give a small and temporary subsidy to entice providers to provide access to rural areas. The group here apparently doesn’t like the idea of any subsidies. Ethan doesn’t particularly like them either. His point was that systems are being put into existing infrastructures that are typically over-regulated and that are not going to go overnight to no regulation. (Ethan, if I get this wrong, please correct me!) [I personally am a liberal and not a pure free market extremist like many here, so I’m not always against subsidies.]
Judith Meskill has blogged will be blogging the session.
Tom Eisenmann of Harvard Business talks about how to get to the next billion. We need ubiquitous VoIP and thus ubiquitous broadband, he says. Maybe this requires a push from cable because the local carriers (ILEC) will not cannibalize themselves otherwise. He thinks startups alone are not likely to suffice.
He thnks startups alone aren’t enough to get to a billion because their quality of service isn’t good enough. (Tom Evslin says that all calls are going over multiple networks so no one can guaranatee QoS.) Not to mention that the cable companies have the marketing clout.
He thinks that enterprise acceptance of VoIP will create demand for the same features in the residential market. There might be a beneficial race to the bottom.
He presents some facts: 95% of homes are within reach of cable. 64M homes in the US already have cable video service, constituting 62% of the homes within reach. 89% of homes within reach have cable modem service offered to them. Of those, 18% have cable modems. Cable companies are marketng VoIP aggressively. Morgan Stanley predicts 14% of homes within reach of cable will be using VoIP by 2008.
Tom does a case study of Cox cable and concludes that they are providing a service that emulates “normal” phone services, and charge for it accordingly. They handle IP voice as if it were IP traffic. They have “soft switches” but in every way it looks to the customer like plain old circuit switched telephony.
A study shows that people first want reliable access to 911 (74%), always on (69%), accurate and easy bills (63%), and low cost (57%). [Sounds like a market that doesn’t know what’s possible. And if it knew what “low cost” means in a VoIP world — I think it’s $0.03/minute to London from the US with Vonage — “low cost” would probably climb to the top of the list.]
Why aren’t they innovating, I ask. Tom says that it’s because they’ve been an unregulated monopoly and just don’t think that way. Bob Frankston adds that they’re afraid of opening the pipe because it’ll kill their video business. Jeff Paine of Utstar says they just don’t think that way. Besides, he says, VoIP is just a small part of their business.
Three scenarios: 1. ILEC’s go extinct and a patchwork prevails, or municipal broadband steps in, or they are propped up. 2. Dueling duopolists (ILEC Video vs fiber to the neighborhood or satellite). 3. Duopolist Detente (Cable stays out of the voice business and the ILEC stays out of the video business, and we all get locked into monopolies). Tom goes into these possibilities in some depth.
(Tom says RCN is bankrupt. Ulp. They’re my provider. Bob Frankston says that “bankruptcy compost” can be fertile.)
Tom Evslin of Evslin Consulting keynotes from his seat at the tables arranged in rectangle. He talks about the early days of Voice over IP (VoIP) in 1997. He founded ITXC, recently sold to Teleglobe), to connect the little carriers that were emerging.
The greatest importance of VoIP is in the democratiziation of access to the network, tom says. “VoIP has democratized and lowered the barrier to entry,” he says, pointing to David Isenberg’s classic paper. “There’s no question that VoIP is here.”
He says that he went to Europe recently and instead of paying a buck a minute for phone calls, he brought a headset with him, connected via the broadband offered at all the hotels but one, and made Skype Out calls for pennies. [Here’s an interesting article.]
Tom says that wifi is the next VoIP, an industry/infrastructure ready to take off.
He’s worried about the lobbies arrayed against VoIP. He recommends the VON Coalition as a counter-lobby. He also thinks that, although he’s generally a free market guy, some regulation may be required to ensure that “the last mile monopolies aren’t used to stop the provision of services.” Maybe, he says.
He says that the movement of support jobs to India is a huge success made possible by the low cost of communications. A middle class is growing in India. But not in sub-Saharan Africa. He describes instances where communication has transformed poor villages in Bangladesh. The same model worked in Uganda. [Here’s the model as described in the Grameen Foundational Annual report: “Today there are over 25,000 village phone operators in Bangladesh. “Phone Ladies” earn extra income for themselves (an average of $71 per month, more than twice the average Bangladeshi’s monthly income), while allowing others in the village to conduct business or keep in touch with friends and relatives from a distance.”]
He says he thinks he knows how the industry is going to go. “Think of a box,” he says. It has to be self-powered. It’s satelllite linked to geostationary satellites. The box has wifi or wimax coming out of it. “This box, dropped almost anywhere in the world, creates a cloud of IP connectivity over a couple of square miles, depending on the geography.” This, he thinks, is a better solution than the phone ladies reselling the existing cellular network. And, besides, people need more than voice. They’ll need all sorts of IP connectivity. At first, people will use the cloud with cheap wifi phones, but eventually computers will get there. “Even if the box doesn’t make engineering sense, and it makes anticorruption sense because it doesn’t need to connect to a monopoly.” He talks about the need for microcredit and maybe subsidies, but, as much as possible, these boxes and the provision of services over these boxes (which need not be the same) should have a local stake with local gain in order to encourage development.
He recommends a series of small scale steps, done on the “edge” of the network.
[Great talk. Discussion follows…]
Bob Frankston says it’s more important to spread opportunity than solutions. But there’s a feaful desire in the US to define the solution narrowly; we’re afraid of the open, decentralized model. People are afraid of Skype, he says, because the contents are encrypted. He introduces the term “ambient connectivity,” i.e., everything is connected without your even thinking about it. We need to find a model for this. The key piece missing is pervasive encryption because right now it’s not safe to share your connectivity.
David Isenberg wonders what Monique Maddy of Adesemi thinks how Grameen microcredit model might work in Africa. She says she wouldn’t invest in the “phone ladies” model because the cost of cellphones is coming down so fast that the barrier to entry is too low.
Eileen McKeough has been operating a Somali telcom for 7 years. She liked it when Tom talked about getting revenues to the phone ladies since you have to get money to the edge, not just technology. She talks about a Grameen project in Bangladesh where a benefactor pays for Skype Out for a village. She’d like someone to get a premium number in the UK so people could call in and the revenue could be shared with the village. (She mentions that Bangladesh legalized VoIP this week.)
Tom says that telephone numbers are an asset that can be divorced from the physical infrastructure. He recommends organizations use Vonage which allows you to use a US area code wherever you are, thus lowering the cost of calling in and out.
Raj Sharma of Nextone wonders if there’s room for premium services for business. He wouldn’t at this point be willing to put his business on Skype.
David Isenberg says that Skype has twice the audio bandwidth of conventional telephony. He says the question is when latency and jitter will be good enough for business. David says research shows latency is going down dramatically, heading towards 50ms or less anywhere on the Net. It’s showing the effect of Moore’s Law. So, Raj’s concerns are real but temporary. Plus, the ability to integrate with IP text, IP photos and IP everything in a few years will flip the concern: “You mean I have to use a conventional phone for my business call? What a drag!”
Raj agrees but wonders what will happen when some fraction of our 6 billion people are using the Net at the same time for phone and video, etc. Then it will be a “best effort” service.
Yes, says David, but the capacity of the Internet has continually increased apparently without limit. Plus, he’s done a back-of-the-envelope calculation that shows that even if we were all online at the same time, there’d still be a hundred dark fibers in a single cable line. (He admits that his calc is “silly” because the value of the variables can only be guessed at)
Rick Whitt of MCI — author of the crucial A Horizontal Leap Forward— says that there’s plenty of dark fiber available.
There’s discussion of MPLS (Multiprotocol Label Switching). Bob says it’s really an attempt to turn the clock back to circuit switching. [Circuit switching establishes a real, continuous circuit from phone A to B. Packet switching sends out the bits with the address of B and allows the wisdom of the net to route the packets.]
I’m at a small conference — 25-30 people — sponsored by VON and hosted by the Berkman Center, called “The CEO Forum on the Next Billion: Finding ways to move access to communication from 1 billion people on earth to 2 billion and beyond.”
Daniel Berninger introduces the morning. The meeting is for non-incumbent telco providers who usualy are competing against one another but today are going to talk about growing the market. Wireline phones, he says, are decreasing in number. Going to 2 billion users is good for users, good for the world, and good for the industry.
(I originally agreed to lead a session here, but when I found out what the topic actually is — the regulatory threats to VoIP — I panicked and bailed. Fortunately, the gallant John Palfrey of the Berkman Center stepped in and will lead a panel of Ethan Zuckerman, Colin Maclay and me, all Berkpeople.)
October 5, 2004
[NOTE: I have to the plane and am posting this without rereading it for typos or thinkos. Sorry.]
Susan Damais is from Microsoft Research, a group of 700 people in 55 scientific areas in 5 labs, from Redmond to Beijing. Susan says that each group does some search research. And she tells us that her presentation isn’t under the 20-ton Microsoft NDA.
“What’s missing with search?” she asks? Now it consists of a query box and results list. You can do processing in between, but you can also do user modeling, domain modeling, and the context of information use. What are the user’s intent? What are the relationships among people and informaion in the world? And what is the user trying to accomplish? (“Despite what you informavores believe, most people don’t search for the sake of searching. They search to get answers.” — rough paraphrase.)
She and others have been working on “Stuff I’ve Seen” (SIS). Right now, each domain has its own way of searching — we search blogs differently than we search email. SIS wants to give “unified access to heterogeous, distributed content” (mail, files, rss, etc.). It has to be fast and flexible. And you should be able to search from whatever context you’re in, preferably with “implicit queries”: “Queries are generated in context and results are shown in context.” “We’ve learned that people, time and metadata are important.”
She talks about “memory landmarks.” Cognitive science has shown that we organize memory around landmarks, e.g., not “It happened on Oct. 5” but “It happened when Mt. St. Helen’s blew up.” They want to use this to facilitiate search. In one prototype, there’s a set of memory landmarks, both general (world and calendar info) and personal (appointments and photos) they show to the right of the results list to provide cues to help you home in on the information you’re looking for. “I think we can get computationally at some of hese things that make information memorable.”
With personalized, users don’t all get the same results, she says. How can you personalize search without requiring people to maintain a profile, she asks. They can compute similarity based on a variety of apramets, combvine the personalized and standard results, and redisplay. In the prototype, as she moves a slider toward the “personalized” side, the results change, so that a query on “bush” starts to show more results about Vannevar Bush. (The personalization is based on looking at the user’s email, etc., and doing some form of ) It is not changing the query; it is re-ordering the results. [It’s a cool demo, but anything with a slider just has to be cool.]
She talks about novelty analysis, using the “Difference Engine” they’ve built. E.g., how do east and west coast newspapers cover Mt. St. Helen’s, or how blogs cover the election vs, how the media do. They have a prototype called News Junkie that pesonalizes news using onfromation novelty: What’s interesting and different? Given a lead article, how different are the new news articles coming out?
Eric Brill heads the Text Mining, Search and Navigation Group of Microsoft Research. He talks about the “paradigm shift” from thinking that documents are the chief object of search to think that it’s about information. That is, there may be information in documents that isn’t really what the difference about. Or, instead of getting a list of documents in response to a query trying to decide if the invasion of Iraq was justified, suppose you were to get a page that displayed the relevant information.
They have a question-answering system called “AskMSR” that gets 70-75% accurate. So, if you ask “Who did Britney Spears marry in Las Vegas,” you get a list of answers with probabilities; click on the suggested answer and you get the documents from which it’s derived. It gets right “Where as Steve Ballmer born” but wrong “Who ran against Bush in 1988,” to which it answers “Bush,” with “Dukakis” as the third suggestion. But, as Eric says, if you have a grain of intelligence, you’ll actually figure out what the right answer is.
It works by mining a text base looking for strings that look like potential answers. But then they run into natural language issues. But information redundancy helps. E.g., the answer to the question “Who killed Lincon?” shows up tens of thousands of times on the Web, so they don’t have to disambiguate “Booth altered history with a single shot at Lincoln”; they can pick their answer. Or, “How many times did Bjorn Borg win Wimbledon?” You can find lots of strings on the Net like “Bjorn Borg blah blah blah wimbledon bla bla blah 5 blah blah,” that, in their redundancy, make the answer (5) more probable. [Cool way to harness the wisdom of the web, at a statistical level.]
If you have a source like Encarta that is reliable but not redundant (i.e., it only has one entry that answers the question “When did the Titanic sink”?), you can combine it with the words found (statistically) on the Web around the Titanic to do precise queries against Encarta.
Finally, he talks about noisy channel information finding. For example, in spelling correction the system tries to figure out what the original (intended) spelling was based on the misspellings introduced by a “noisy channel.” We’re moving from “doe sthe page contain the query terms” to “Does the page satisfy the information need.”
Lili Cheng heads the Social Computing Group. Her group created “the personal map,” an app that models your social relationships as exhibited in your inbox/outbox, clustering based on who you email together. Her widget also has a slider that moves people into groups based on their groups. [Also cool. I tell ya, that slider thing never fails.] Then they took all of Microsoft’s public email lists and did the same sort of charts, a sort of “Six Degrees of Bill Gates.”
She shows us Wallop: “Socializing and sharing media in the context of your social network.” It’s a slick social network app with a bit of an emphasis on photo sharing. So far, only 424 have been invited into Wallop and 219 have added content. Wallop pays attention to implicit as well as explicit data, inferring your social network. People want to control it, but not have to control it all the time.
Wallop aims to integrate with the rest of your desktop, especially email.
They;re currently looking at how you scale it while maintaining privacy, and how to enable the system to adapt to user behaviour patterns rather than vice versa.
At the Search Champs private conference I’m at, Microsoft has been giving out excellent swag: A copy of Money, Office and Flight Simulator, a logo-ed windbreaker, sun visor and golf shirt, and a thumb storage device….all packed in a logoed-backpack. I’m too mature and self-knowing for swag to affect me, but I’m beginning to think that Microsoft has been badly misunderstood and under-appreciated. Plus, today we get to go to the Microsoft Store where we can spend up to $120 on heavily discounted Microsoft products. Unfortunately, I’m leaving before the trip to the store, so I assume I’m allowed to download $120’s worth of copyright-challenged Microsoft products via BitTorrent at Suprnova.org or the P2P network of my choice. That’s right, isn’t it?
Microsoft took us out to a lovely dinner last night. I sat with three Microsofties and, as always, was impressed with how crazy smart they are across such a wide range of interests. We talked frankly about the day, but also about Aristotle and the birth of persistent taxonomies, whether math escapes science’s revolutionary paradigm, whether art anticipates science, and why I don’t know what the hell I’m talking about when I mouth off about Wolfram. I had a great time and learned a whole bunch.
Sorry, I’d like to be snarky, but I’m just telling you the truth.
Today we have continuous access to the Net during the sessions. Thank you.
September 28, 2004
Andrew is the former general council of the Dept. of Commerce and now is a partner in Mayer, Brown, Rowe & Mawe.
[Pardon my brevity. This was a very good, short talk. But I’m pretty fried. Here’s a quick snippet:
The Internet is global. We had been successful on pushing our “don’t regulate the Internet” line, but with the World Summit on Information Services there’s a serious push for world regulation of the Net. Countries have inconsistent demands. To defeat pro-regulation forces, we hvae to take a decentralized approach. We have to defeat them all, not patch them up. The ITU will have exactly the opposite approach.
John Morris, Center for Democacy and Technology
Mike Godwin, Public Knowledge
Geraldine Matise, FCC
Christopher Murray, Vonage
John Morris,
Douglas McCollum, Fiducianet
Timothy Wu, Columbia Law School
David Young, Verizon
Matise: CALEA allows law enforcement agencies to get information in close to real time. And it requires the information to be put into a standardized format. The Justice Dept. would like the FCC to assume more of an enforcement role, which the FCC is reluctant to do.
Morris: The substantial replacement language is applicable to email. If we go down the road the FCC is going down, CALEA will apply to it.
Godwin: We need to do cost-benefit analyses as the limiting principle because there’s no limiting principle built in.
Morris: Most of the mainstream public interest groups accept that there’s going to be some interception [= wiretaps]. The problem is with CALEA.
Wu: How hard are these rules making it for new businesses to get started? The FCC is most successful when it allows something to develop free of government permission and requires it to comply with regulatory stories once it has gotten established.
Murray: It has to run at the physical layer or we miss Skype.
Young: At the physical layer, you can’t provide things like call-to, call-from, call times, etc. All you see at the physical layer are IP addresses.
Murray: Vonage will be CALEA compliant. Not because we’re an information provider but because we made a business choice. [The choice not to fight an expensive losing fight]
Wu: Email really should be more subject to CALEA than VoIP. For one thing, email is well-established and won’t fail to take root because of CALEA’s impositions. If you were taking a mainstream approach, that’s where you’d start. The fledgling technologies shouldn’t be subject to it initially.
Morris: In April, the FBI was talking to people about CALEA. During that period I had an hour-long conversation with two FBI engineers. They are so stuck in the old way of doing things. They understand telephones. They don’t understand all that SIP stuff. At the end of the day, there will be sophisticated criminals who can circumvent the FBI, if CALEA goes the way it’s going. The FBI cries, “Terrorist! Terrorist!” but they’re not going to get them. They’re going to get the common criminal. That’s a bad reason to impose telephony regulation on a new media application.
Morris: CALEA was originally conceived as being of narrow scope. Louis Freeh went to Congress and said we’re giving up on the Internet in order to focus on digital telephony (not IP-based). Law enforcement has bamboozled the FCC by repeatedly saying that it needs this. There’s no public record saying that this is a genuine problem.
Someone in the audience in Elliott Spitzer’s office, says, yes, there is a problem. They have phone taps interrupted when someone says, “Let me call you on my push-to-talk phone.”
Godwin: If you want to be able to tap every communications type, you’ll kill innovation.
McCollum: There’s a very good case that as soon as criminals know there’s a service that isn’t wire-tapped, that’s where they’ll go.
Q: What assurances are there that CALEA won’t open the door to all sorts of abuses in the name of fighting terrorism, just as in the 50s and 60s, the FBI engaged in abuses in the name of fighting communism?
No response from the panel.
Stewart is general counsel to the Commission on Intelligence Capabilties or the US Regarding WMD, but he’s speaking on behalf of himself.
CALEA was pretty good as written, he says. “The problem with the FCC’s tentative conclusions is that it takes a statutory set of standards and turns it into a kind of commission mush.”
“The one fundamental thing about regulating to give law enforcement access to new technology is that there’s a big cliff effect.” At some point the regulations stop. Are you going to tell Intel how to design their chips and Cisco how to design their routers? Eventually you got to a spot in the economy that’s beyond regulation. Where do you put the cliff? CALEA said they’d put it in rate-regulated industries. The FCC instead said that information services are exempt “sometimes.” That “mushy” response gives the FCC what it really wants: “Discretion to reach out and regulate a little more” to accommodate all the stakeholders. That means you can’t really know whether you’re regulated or not.
CALEA sets a performance standard for companies as opposed to a type of input-output regulation. It says you must make your telecommunications — every call — isolatable and deliverable to law enforcement. We don’t care how you do it. You won’t be challenged until a law enforcement agency comes to you, which gives you some time to establish your business. The FCC, under pressure from enforcement agencies, instead demands that on Day One you have to have all the CALEA features the FBI wants. That will discourage innovation: You first have to sit down with the FBI and figure out how you’re going to meet every CALEA requirement from the beginning.
The “substantial replacement” test that the FCC has adopted is “dangerous.” The original statute says that if your tech is going up as the PSTN is going down, then you are subject to CALEA. The FCC instead says that “substantial replacement” can be “decided in the abstract.” Anything that connects to you to the Internet is now a potential substantial replacement…wireless, maybe even private pbx connections, can be treated as covered by CALEA.
“The FCC makes a big deal” out of the few things it rejects, e.g., the FBI’s desire to have the right of approval over any new technology. The FCC says that if you have any doubts, you can go to FCC and they’ll them. So, innovators will do it because they don’t want to find out otherwise after they’ve built it. So, you’ll talk with the FCC and the FBI, and they’ll assume the worst, so you’ll launch anywhere but the US so you can see how it works, get the bugs out, have some money to go back to the FCC to go through the regulatory process. “What this does to innovation in the telecommunications in the market in the US is disastrous.”
[This and John Rogovin’s were excellent presentations, IMO I.e., I understood over 50% of what they said.]
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