Nova Internet Calling Trial
FWD initiated an effort to recruit participants for a trial (http://siptosip.net) of an Internet voice architecture - Nova Internet calling. The trial tests the utility of inserting a conference server (aka Nova server) into the call flow. It evaluates the Nova approach as a means to ease the deployment of Internet connected communication devices, and, in particular, support the deployment of recently available high definition (HD) (G.722) IP Phones. The Nova architecture also seeks to facilitate incremental device deployment in do-it-yourself, bring-your-own broadband and device mode.
The telephone network connects person in location A to a person in location B. Nova Internet calling connects both person A and person B to location C (the Nova server). All communication flows from end point to Nova. End points get connected to each other when two or more connect to the same Nova. The Nova servers like web servers can support an arbitrary number of virtual locations. Off-the-shelf SIP based conference servers provide a starting point for the functionality imagined for a Nova server.
The dramatically superior functionality of a Nova server relative to an end point makes the Nova to end point connection easier to achieve. Inserting a Nova server in the call flow between end points enables transparent multi-party support, transcoding between incompatible end points, and expands addressing options. It eliminates the requirement of linking a particular device to a particular end user. The device used to connect to a Nova does not need to have significance given availability of more flexible means for identifying callers (e.g. PIN).
The merits of the Internet for voice communication parallel those making the Internet a transformative mechanism for distributing text and graphics. Unmetered connections between Internet end points located anywhere in the world represents communication nirvana. The agnostic nature of the Internet relative to the content of packets makes for more efficient transport than the media specific transport mechanisms built into the telephone network. Decoupling transport and media type removes the principal barrier to communication device innovation.
Tim Berners Lee proposed the web server in 1989 as a means to cope with the varied mechanisms used to store information on computers connected to the Internet. Inserting a web server between end users and the unmanageable complexity of information on random computers made the world wide web an alternative to Gutenberg's printing press. The Nova server applies the same mechanism in a communication context by mediating between end users and the unmanagable complexity of Internet connected end points toward the goal of making Internet voice an alternative to Alexander Graham Bell's telephone.
The stream of innovations flowing from the Internet leaves the lowly telephone call remarkably untouched. This fact seems even more striking given 40 years of Moore's Law driven processor improvements, the emergence VoIP in 1995 and the SIP open standard in 2000, and the growing availability of broadband after 2000. While evolving technology transformed the means of delivering telephone calls, it did not alter the end user experience of a telephone call. This outcome owes to the structural obstacles to innovation associated with the PSTN and the motivations of the entities in a position to do the innovating.
Traditional telephone architectures presume uniform needs independent of communication context and willingness to pay. President Obama's calls with foreign leaders suffer the same mediocre voice quality as teenagers planning a party. The demand for matching voice quality to context remains uncertain, but it seems reasonable to believe people might want more than one level of quality as in the case of transportation, housing, or food. Tim Berners Lee's original 1989 web server proposal sought to counter assertions of an adequate information retrieval status quo.
Recent declines in demand for voice services follows the growing number of Internet enabled text communication options. The status quo leaves a telephone call as the last resort in contexts too urgent or complex for the alternatives. Voice nonetheless remains a very large business with seventy percent of telephone company revenues still generated through voice services. Voice gets no love but it remains the dominant mode of in-person communication. Restoring voice to its former status as the communication medium of choice requires improvements in quality and reductions in cost.
Resurrecting the Communications Business Model
The woeful state of the telecom growth reflects an industry oblivious to the power of its core value proposition - communication. The conference schedules offered 55,000 people attending GSM World in Barcelona and a similar number expected at CTIA Wireless in Las Vegas include no sessions on voice communication. Mobile apps, social media, and banking, but no sessions on the topic that still accounts for 70% of industry revenue. Ditto for (the canceled for 2010) wireline sector Supercomm event last October.
The word "communication" arose in the 1400's as a label for the process allowing humans to reach a shared understanding. At the time, communication required getting together in-person. Dependence on proximity started to decrease with the arrival Johannes Gutenberg's printing press in 1440. A familiar list of subsequent innovations through and including the Internet further diminished proximity as a requirement for human communication. Several of these innovations including the printing press and the telephone altered the communication landscape to a degree that produced a reorganization of civil society on the planet.
The declining fortunes of telephone companies reflect a failure to understand people value the outcome of communication - achieving a shared understanding - not the mechanism of communication. The traditional telephone call suffered little competition in this regard before the arrival of the Internet. People with questions in 1994 did not have a Google search as an option. They picked up the telephone and called someone.
Before the Internet, maintaining business and personal relationships involved substantial time on the telephone. The increasing refinement email and a steady stream of text and image communication innovations like Facebook and Twitter leave telephone calls a last resort necessary only in those contexts too urgent or too complex to address by any other means.
A misunderstanding about the source of value represents the root cause of the problem, and the relative pace of innovation between telco voice services (zero) and alternatives (substantial) represents the principal symptom. The pockets of prosperity that do exist arise in the limited areas enjoying investment and innovation. The utility of voice as a medium for communication is not in doubt, but traditional telephone calls offer less voice quality than AM radio and drop 2/3's of the voice energy available in-person.
Orange's plans for high definition voice trials in Europe represent a significant development, but any means of diminishing proximity's grip on communication will suffice. The effort to close the gap between communication tools and the multi-dimensional means of communication available in-person will not end any time soon. Leaving voice services unimproved for 40+ years reflects a process of improvement that still needs to start.
The pursuit of excellence telephone companies apply in the case of reliability needs to extend to all the dimensions restricting communication to those contexts where people meet in-person. The transformative power of communication innovations and the revenue potential of a communication business model far exceeds anything that might arise from app stores or any of the other data services occupying conference attendees in Barcelona and Las Vegas.
Finndle.com - Toward a Cyberspace White Pages
The lack of a comprehensive source for contact information represents a drag on commerce and a significant obstacle to communication. The burden of finding and managing contact information weighs against adoption of new communication offers. Finndle.com applies crowd sourcing to create a white pages for Cyberspace. The web app combines guestbook functionality with a mechanism for obtaining introductions and exchanging contacts. Finndle provides websites something like the networking function of a meeting sign-in sheet - an Online Digits Exchange.
Telephone white pages served as the social networking tool of choice before the Internet, but the utility of white pages declined as communication moved to mobile phones and the Internet. The web provides advertisers with options that go beyond traditional yellow pages, but telephone white pages remain the primary source of contact information for the communicating public. Finndle seeks to create a cyberspace white pages by making social networking a feature of websites rather than just a function of sites like Facebook and MySpace.
Traditional telephone directories were possible because telephone companies controlled telephone numbers and forced the publication of listings on an opt-out basis. The element of coercion disappears in the case of the web, so Finndle offers users control over their listing and privacy as an incentive to opt-in to a global directory. Finndle uses the fact a website's audience reflects the content. Finndle treats websites as the cyberspace equivalent of towns in the case of traditional directories.
The Finndle home page aggregates the resulting guestbooks under a search interface. As participation grows, guestbooks develop into local directories and collectively yield a white pages for cyberspace. Listings can include any form of communication or links pointing to profiles created via social networks. Finndle also provides a means for users to create a "SocialID" alias that points to their listing via the Finndle search interface or as a URL of the form www.finndle.com/socialid.
The SocialID reduces the burden of managing multiple communication devices and coordinates. It reduces the leverage service providers obtain from controlling telephone numbers and screen names. Distributing the Finndle SocialID avoids the need to share physical telephone numbers or actual email addresses that tend to change over time. Users can also create different listings and SocialID's for different contexts or even on an adhoc basis for "tonight's party".
Finndle gives websites operators a mechanism to engage and better understand the nature of their audience. The listings (i.e. guestbook signers) form a local directory of the most enthusiastic segment of a website's audience. There exist opportunities to create special offers to incent people to participate and take advantage of the feedback they can provide. Website operators can create subdirectories for various contexts (e.g. events or specific pages) and private invitation only directories. All resulting registrations and listings remain under the control of the host website.
Africa the Last Infotech Frontier
See pictures from trip to Ghana, Africa
hereA recent two week visit to Ghana, Africa offered scenes frozen in time from the moment of the country's independence in 1957 and even from the period before European powers arrived circa 1500. Most of the buildings and infrastructure date to the 1950's before seven military coups over thirty years made investment impossible. Open sewers remain the norm and modern paved roads the exception. The use of English as the official language traces to the colonial period, but an intricate system of village chiefs controlling local government and ownership of land traces to the period before the arrival of European powers. Yet, Ghana like a number of other countries in Africa generates among the highest mobile phone growth rates on Earth.
Ghanaian's have access to very nearly the same devices, features, and pricing as people in Europe or the USA a mere eight years after mobile phones first arrived. The timing coincides with the relative stability of Ghana after democratic elections in 1999. The success of mobile phone companies illustrates the opportunity a stable Africa presents for the larger infotech and communication industries. Vodafone acquired the state owned telco incumbent Ghana Telecom for $900mn in August 2008. The deal along with promised $500mn investments in fiber infrastructure represents a fresh start for Ghana. Government leaders understand keenly continued stability means investments in support of a jump to middle income and, eventually, first world status.
The government of Ghana has an explicit plan to move away from merely providing raw materials and toward a knowledge economy. Information, communication, and technology (ICT) projects already represent among the highest priorities for government and aid organizations, but there remains significant work to do in attracting attention to commercial sector opportunities. The 850 million people distributed across the 53 countries in Africa represent 11% of world population. The opportunity for economic growth remains tremendous with consumption of consumer goods, electricity usage, and per capita income a mere 5% of the levels in developed countries.
The 500 year track record of trade and conquest in Africa was shaped by the desire to extract the resources sought by more developed countries. Sustaining a knowledge economy requires precisely the opposite strategy where advantage depends on avoiding war and working to help move Africa toward full participation in the global economy. A successful transition to a knowledge economy can make Africa a sustainable economic engine for the entire planet. Ghana represents a greenfield opportunity relative to investments flowing toward China and India. The nature of Africa as a cash economy leaves the continent relatively untouched by the credit market turmoil in the developed world.
Africa deserves a fresh look, but investments still require a plan incorporating the realities of history. While the people of Ghana covet education as the key to upward mobility, this mobility frequently means the elite leave the country in search of opportunity. Any renaissance in Ghana needs to include convincing Ghanians to stay. There exist very few large employers in the country, so 75% of the population depends on self employment. Boot strapping Ghana's knowledge economy will need to start with external demand, but the country's potential as a gateway to Africa should create the demand for information technology in financial, health care, industrial, transportation, and government sectors.
Companies and entrepreneurs interested in participating in a renaissance of Africa also need to negotiate a number of risks and build first world amenities from scratch. Travel to Ghana includes a mandatory Yellow Fever vaccination and precautions regarding the risk of contracting Malaria. Relatively poor sanitation infrastructure means applying significant caution to avoid health problems arising from unsafe food and water. A Chinese company went so far as to import all the food, water, and workers necessary to complete the construction of a stadium in the country, but the main issue is controlling the conditions of food preparation. Inadequate capacity and unpaved roads make travel in and out of and between cities arduous. Outages make backup power a requirement for deployment of information processing and communication equipment.
Six competing mobile phone companies make communication an important exception to the list of infrastructure deficits. Broadband penetration remains less than 2%, but competing fiber builds connecting the country's cell towers promise cheap and ubiquitous wireless broadband. Enterprising Ghanians already talk about the country's potential to become Africa's "Silicon Valley". The parallels between Ghana and California look rather substantial in terms of population size, natural resources, and coastal location. The direct economic comparisons may only fit with California in the mid 1800's, but the rapid spread of mobile phone technologies suggest it will not take 150 years for Ghana to catch up.
Calling Circles
FWD outlined instructions for creating
Calling Circles on the FWDWiki. A Calling Circle offers the telecom equivalent of social networking friend lists. It is a directory of friends accessible via FWD. The elimination of usage based communication charges associated with services like FWD gives communication with friends a different character. The wait continues for cool new communication applications, but Free World Dialup members already enjoy global termination of calls as with any Internet application. The technical setup obstacles remain significant, but any FWD member can talk with any other FWD member anywhere in the world for as long as they want for no cost beyond the
$30 membership fee. This opens up the possibility for a different type of communication experience even as the process of dialing numbers and dependence on a familiar looking telephones remains unchanged.
Return on Infrastructure Investment
There remains a large gap in perception regarding the value of communication infrastructure investment versus transportation infrastructure. Everyone gets the tremedous RoI achieved by public sector infrastructure projects associated with highways and airports, but communication infrastructure gets left to private entities intent on leveraging scarcity to preserve prices. The telco business model is anti-investment. The policy debates always revolve around this issue of investment where telco's argue they need some policy result in order to have incentive to invest. They win the policy result and subsequently fail to invest. Capital investment as a function of revenues remains very low. Most of the telcos invest less than they report in depreciation. The US government subsidizes billions worth of noise suppression barrier walls around highways across the country and zero in communcation infrastructure. It's not clear how to recreate the conditions that led to the interstate highway system initiated during the Eisenhower administration, but until the US obtains an equivalent conviction regarding connectivity the country will fall further and further behind in the global economy.
ICED
The mnemonic ICED stands for
independent developers, connectivity, emerging markets, and devices. It serves as a filter to help in navigating toward the areas generating the most opportunities. More and more companies are deciding that they can't afford to employ the number of developers necessary to maintain the pace of innovation. Plan B calls for creating open platforms that attract interest from
independent developers. The trend likely originated from the terrific productivity and innovation generated by the open source movement. The opportunity for independent developers will grow as will the competition for their attention. Google, Apple, and
Nokia compete for the attention of
independent developers regarding their mobile platforms. AOL created dev.aol.com and opened up all their products as the means to traffic growing innovations.
Connectivity represents the primary bottleneck/driver for
infocom innovation in the same way processing power drives the
infotech industry. All the inputs necessary for cool new products improve in price performance at a rapid clip except for connectivity.
Emerging markets and the 3 billion people without access to communication represent a far more interesting market that trying to sell someone in the developed world a second mobile phone.
Devices connected to the Internet represent an entirely greenfield opportunity. The easy of use obstacles preventing the SIP
VoIP device from growing mainstream will get solved.
