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3G Is A Dog, And Other Truths
naylorjs writes: "This is an interesting article from the BBC about the technological future, in particular broadband and wireless. What makes it more interesting is the comments about nation states and such like. A certain amount of lateral thinking in use here, something that we don't see enough of in the technology field. IMHO."
It was an interesting interview, don't get me wrong, but news outlets like The Register have been telling the truth about 3G for over 2 years - for some reason there's been a stubborn refusal to believe it - perhaps because it's not what we want to hear?
Think outside the... Hey, where'd the friggin' box go?
That's a little beside the point. In Europe, some operators make (Telia, Sonera, Orange UK) make more than 10% of cellular revenues from SMS. (Short Messaging Service, the GSM IM solution.)
Because SMS is a store-and-forward technology it is bandwidth unintensive (or at least, can be fitted around other network traffic). And at 15c a message, it is pretty lucrative.
Find the European cellular operator that makes less money from SMS than other data revenues. Right now instant messaging is the only data application that is remotely profitable.
--- My dad's political betting
It's 8am on Sunday and you're excruciatingly hungover. Tthe concept of actually having to talk to someone (let alone get out of bed) is way beyond your grasp but you are supposed to meet a friend to go scuba diving in an hour. SMS is an excellent way of being absolutely certain you won't have to engage in an actual conversation with them, while still allowing you to let them know you are piking on the dive plan (this happens to me a lot).
SMS is a handy way of quickly passing on information to multiple people. It's also a good way of passing on a quick message without having to have a conversation - there are a lot of situations where you can't talk but you can type.
And for the phone companies... should an SMS be replied to, requiring a further reply, they get to charge you for each snippet of the message - so they make more off you than they would have with the equivalent voice call.
And to the question of handsets... all handsets currently available here (Australia) are SMS capable. So what's the big deal? People change their handset every couple of years anyway.
Uh, I wouldn't get too excited about cryptostreams between phones just yet.
The 3GPP standard on which 3G is based requires that the platform support what is called "lawful interception." See http://www.3gpp.org/ for details.
Also, the phones don't really have the capacity (in CPU cycles or the watts to drive them, which is the real limiting factor) to do secure crypto of realtime traffic.
You could ofcourse have checked the Media Lab website to see where Nicholas Negroponte is. He is still there on the webpage. http://www.media.mit.edu/~nicholas/
He is working there as a director in a foreign minister role. Not strange after having been its director for about 15 years.
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Think about it - cell phones that have enough bandwidth to transmit encrypted datastreams between phones. And not the cheesy 40-bit breakable encryption that they use on current PCS systems, either.
Clarification: Encryption and bandwidth are orthogonal. Properly implemented encryption, whether of stronger or weaker varieties, adds almost zero data to the stream. Increased bandwidth does nothing to either facilitate or hamper the use of strong crypto.
More powerful processors in the phones can facilitate the use of some forms of strong crypto, but really the processors are already powerful enough. Modern symmetric block and stream ciphers are amazingly efficient and even very tiny processors can easily execute RC4 at a rate of 4KB per second. Digitizing and compressing the audio is much more difficult.
Tiny processors do have a hard time with RSA private key operations (public key ops are much simpler, given small public exponents), which means that RSA can be used for symmetric key exchange but not authentication, but some sort of password-based authentication could be used -- or users could just authenticate verbally.
So, 3G is irrelevant to law enforcement in this respect. Programmable phones that allow user-loaded software to perform computations on the encoded data streams would scare the bejeezus out of them, though.
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