What's Next in Telecommunications?

CNet is reporting that with the telecommunication industry's annual powwow coming up the hot button seems to be television rather than phones. From the article: "Judging from the diverse list of keynote speakers, it's easy to see that the phone business is readying itself for cataclysmic change. The traditional telecommunications market has already begun consolidating in anticipation. [...] Putting itself back together two decades after being broken apart, the new AT&T faces an entirely different competitive environment. Phone companies and cable companies will soon be competing directly with each other not just for broadband customers, but also for TV and phone customers."

Comments

Re:Destruction of "standards"

[Anonymous Coward]

Here's the problem - your vision is quite persuasive to me and to a /. audience, but I don't think it's that appealing to your average citizen. The telephone is a great product because it has a simple interface - pick up handset, dial numbers, and connection happens. TV is even simpler -- turn on TV, enter channel numbers or just use UP/DOWN to switch between them. These are things you can sell to millions of people and millions can use them happily because the interface is simple.

Now I know that a TV station is just a multicast video stream, which could just as easily be delivered over a general-purpose IP connection. And the same for telephones -- it's just two voice streams between endpoints, and some handshaking protocols.

The problem is that general-purpose transport systems like the internet result in a multiplicity of interfaces which are difficult to standardize into useful products (and I don't just mean commercial products). Think of email, for example. Thankfully people are almost universally using DNS with MX records, and SMTP to get the messages delivered. But there's plain text email, rich text email, HTML email, weird hybrids of those, S/MIME, PGP, GPG, inline attachments, and who knows how many other ways to format the payload. It's not seamless.

It takes something like the FCC to standardize TV, or now HDTV, into specific resolutions, codecs, etc. Otherwise you get embrace-and-extend issues, and it doesn't Just Work the way millions of people need it to. Now, assuming you have specified the system like the FCC does, and you're going to have thousands of pieces of production hardware, and millions of pieces of consumption hardware, the leap to using purpose-allocated frequencies for transmission doesn't seem all that illogical, especially when it's the only way to really guarantee the quality of service necessary for a good video stream. (I know you're right about using these frequencies more efficiently with an on-demand general access model, but I don't think it's super-realistic.)

Point being, unless you NAIL down a central spec for running these consumer-level applications over IP, your generalized super-duper wireless network will be fragmented on the application layer, and mis-prioritized on the transport layer, and you will have trouble delivering the real simple applications that consumers want.

Re:Old fogeys...

[pandrijeczko]

If you're handing out memberships to an "old fogeys" club, you can count me in!

I'm pretty happy with standard DVDs on my non-HDTV TV at home connected to a reasonable hifi amp with a nice pair of speakers (one for each ear, works at my knowledge level of mathematics)...

I'm in the UK and just have terrestrial TV, when I watch it. I can't justify paying for a cable/satellite service that has adverts on it - I'd pay for no ads or have it free with ads, no compromise there...

I have a Nokia 6310i mobile phone that's about 3 years old & just makes phone calls & stores numbers - no camera, colour screen but it fits into my equally old car kit fine...

I have a 1MB DSL service because that's all I can get in my area. I'd like more but I'll live with this until there's an upgrade, it's no biggie...

I think far too many people (particularly the younger generation) get dragged into this "new technology is cool" thing without thinking about it - they just fall for the hype, hand over their money and off they go for six months until the next model comes out.

To be fair, I was probably the same 10-15 years ago but then there was less choice, less advertising and less constant change - now I figure something is worth buying only if most or all of its features are useful to me.

Yes, I'm turning into a miserable old git who actively avoids brand names ("How come Gap don't pay me to wear that T-shirt with their logo on it?") but what the hell... we ALL become our fathers one day...

Hooray!

[Greyfox]

We may finally get the videophone that was originally envisioned in the 50's. Of course, there're a lot of times when you don't want a video feed of the other party. That's probably why none of the current solutions have really seen widespread use. My company has a videoconferencing setup that seems to work pretty well for meetings, but I don't see it being common in the home anytime soon.

It seems to me that the vision of the future we all have today is nowhere near as optimistic as the vision of the future they had in the '50's. They all thought that by this time everyone would have flying cars, video phones, personalized robots to eliminate boring chores, food pills that would provide the nutrition of an entire meal in one small pill and so forth.

What's our equivalent of the flying car? It's not the flying car -- we've pretty much decided that that is an insurmountable engineering task for the foreseeable future. Virtual Reality? Doesn't seem to have the same style the flying car did and I don't expect VR to catch on anytime soon. Possibly not within my lifetime. A manned trip to Mars? I suppose it could be a manned trip to Mars.

Don't get me wrong, we're still doing some neat stuff. We just don't seem to have our sights set as high as we did back then.

Video Killed the Internet Star

[Doc Ruby]

Verizon and AT&T are sick of trying to compete with informed customers exposed to choices and chances to stick together in the conflict of their interests with vendors. Telephony was as interactive as they ever wanted to get - they always wanted to just shove content down their pipes to subscribed captive audiences. But cable TV arrived just when the telephony monopoly was weakest: the mid-1980s, when the monopoly finally was forced to at least compete in some markets, like long distance and mobile.

But now they've returned, buying up regional Bells and mobile operators rather than compete with them. Telephony is a lot like a duopoly, at least in "primary service" (the corp that bills the customer and maintains the brand): AT&T and Verizon. Their real competition comes from cable TV, with its own infrastructure, brands and increasingly telephony, and a little from Internet - the parts they don't own, like the cablemodem ISPs. So their strategy is to fight their main competitor, which is clearly cable TV.

They could have just made telephony better. Mobile phones so reliable they never permanently drop calls. Making the Internet so cheap that it "goes away" from customers minds, replaced by billable services. Integrating voice as merely a feature in every app that ties people together. Making ubiquitous "phones" the multimedia terminals of a complete telecom environment. But that meant taking a risk competing by improving the product, actually competing with cable TV in quality.

Instead they just want to leverage their competitive advantages, especially regulatory, to kill the competition and inherit those customers. All this talk of "2-tier Internet" is just a way to use up all the extra bandwidth capacity on video, making it scarce and expensive rather than cheap. The "nonpremium tier" will force competitors to substandard performance, or to subsidize their own demise, just like telcos did to DSL competitors for the few years they taught telcos how to operate that business.

All whether customers want more video or not. What we want is more P2P, more separated interests between networks, content and apps. More reliable, simpler features that connect us to each other. Instead we'll get a dazzling array of crappy features and content, all funneling a fat pipe from our wallets to the cartel controlling the network.