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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."
you keep using that word; I do not think it means what you think it means.
"Television, the new phone-killer!"
Making you think you're crazy is a billion dollar industry.
I think we'll start seeing more convergence between the various standards -- today I watch more "television" on my PDA than I do on my actual television screen. I probably watch more on my t809 Samsung cell phone than on my TV, too.
AT&T re-merging means nothing to me as AT&T (and Comcast and T-Mobile and the Chicago Tribune and WGN radio) mean nothing to me at all -- they're all dated mechanisms that came about because of the FCC allowing them what no individual had a right to anymore: the airwaves. The local communities were colluding with the cartels as well, giving right of way to only a few select companies in exchange for a nice chunk of change over the decades. I constantly bring grief to my village council meetings when I decry the few dollars Comcast continues to pay the village for every bill they collect.
I see such a great waste in available bandwidth due to excessive (and in my mind unconstitutional) FCC regulation of frequencies. For me, data is data and I just want to get at it faster and in more areas. To think that we're still going to send data over the UHF and VHS frequencies 50,000 watts at a time in a "one size fits all" broadcast is unthinkable. Those same frequencies could be better used to let people get what they want, when they want, in the form they want, at the price they want. Imagine how much more bandwidth would be available if the frequencies were available for the NEXT wireless standards.
The typical replies to a proposal such as this are "someone will broadcast on every frequency so no one can communicate" or "without regulation we'd get interference all over the place." I can not see someone broadcasting 50,000 watts on every frequency as the power needed to run a transmittor at that power on every frequency would quickly bankrupt the transmitter. A brigand could send random bursts on random frequencies, but a good software radio can frequency hop fast enough to not make this a problem. The idea of interference is also reduced by the software radio idea -- plus the fact that transmitters want to get the signal out more than they want to block the signal gives me the belief that we won't see these problems. An advertiser in today's market COULD by every advertisement spot on every media format, but no one has. Why is that?
We have to stop thinking in terms of television, radio, cell phone, WiFi, narrowband, broadband, etc. Those terms can be filed next to telegraph. For me, I want real convergence: manufacturers finding ways to frequency hop faster, incorporating software radios that can adjust to what the receiver and the sender need rather than be shoehorned into a narrow band of frequencies and amplifier power.
Yet we all know -- or should know -- that the frequencies aren't regulated for the people, they're regulated to keep control of the system in the hands of the elite -- the distribution cartels. Nothing will change over time, in fact I believe we'll see our beloved Internet regulated "to protect the people" but in reality it'll be regulated to protect the content cartels. The RIAAs, the MPAAs, the publisher's associations and all the various collusive elements that controlled information yesterday are looking to control information tomorrow, and most people will not mind.
I mind because I see the power of data -- a small packet of information that isn't important until it is used. To think that we have gigahertz of bandwidth being used to try to give everyone the same thing is beyond me, and part of the reason I hate the FCC and want to see it disbanded completely so that society has a chance to meet our own needs in the future -- one IP connection at at time.
Here in Norway we've seen a rise of companies offering "triple play", i.e. phone, broadband and cable all over fiberoptics. Affordable prices as well, especially the phone is a lot cheaper than what regular phone providers offer.
buy tinfoil
"Academicians are more likely to share each other's toothbrush than each other's nomenclature."
Cohen
I'd like to see the day where one pays for Data in and out -- nothing more. You get all of your services (TV, phone, internet, etc.) over one line. Heh. Like that'll ever happen.
VOIP + WiMax (or some such) will up end destroying core Cel and Hardline businesses, unless they are successful in tiering Internet access (i.e. charging or prioritzing certain content-providers/websites) - which would be a BAD thing.
Barring that, it'll become about triple or quadruple pay (voice, IP, cable, etc.) bundles of access, as it has in Europe.
I think the latter scenario is good for consumers, the former, well not so much.
What's not clear to me is how, even with open web services (ala Web 2.0 hype) how any company but the big players profit. Unless, I guess, "getting bought" maybe counts?
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graphicallyspeaking
graphically speaking
Welcome to the Internet.
Phone Voip with a low-latency connection
TV Video Torrents
Radio Webcasting
The thing is you need a Real good connection to use those.Internet will slowly supersede all communication methods.
And then there's wireless, with companies such as Ruckus Wireless adapting Wi-Fi for broadband video.
I wish the FCC would assign more useful shortwave parts of the spectrum to the ISM band for 802.x so we could start experimenting with meshing and maybe be like amateur radio where you buy your equiment and get online using an open standard with no company involded.
Who needs a provider when the airways are a zero cost medium?
I'm so confused. :(
We're headed to a duopoly on the pipes to the home, cable and ILEC. Of course, with FiOS, Verizon's figured out the way to block out alternate DSL providers... once the phone companies don't have to share IP access, and the cable companies don't (see NCTA v. Brand X), they'll have control of both pipes into the home.
g azine/content/05_45/b3958092.htm
WiMax might have a place out in the burbs, but in New York, I can't see how it can possibly serve the populace without interfering with its competition.
With QoS, Vonage is going to slowly go down the tubes, as Time Warner, Cablevision, Comcast, AT&T, et al provide themselves better IP service than their competitors. (We know what Ed Whitacre, AT&T CEO thinks about this... http://www.businessweek.com/@@n34h*IUQu7KtOwgA/ma
Oh, well. Squeeze your buttcheeks together.
500GB of disk, 5TB of transfer, $5.95/mo
Disclaimer: I was laid off after 21 years from this company... go figure
Well, if my observations offer any insight (they probably don't)... the company from which I was laid off was hot and heavy in one of their most important endeavors at the time: converting their public facing web presence to C#/.Net technology. I certainly had many other suggestions for important work to be done.
So, let that be one indicator of how prepared the telcos may or may not be for the shifting winds in the telecommunications industry.
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...
Gentoo Linux - another day, another USE flag.
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.
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
What I'd really like to see next in telecommunications is the ability to call someone from anywhere, speak into a device, and have a person on the other end hear what I say, all the time, every time. Once they get that working, the other things will be nice too.
Think of it, those boring little static images you get on your snail mail. What if they could show you the latest Madonna video, or episode of Lost? Think of how much money the music, television and movie industries could make if they could beam their content to stamps?
... unless of course your credit card is maxed out from all the subscription service fees your paying to get tv, music, movies and video on a stamp.
I am surprised Apple isn't realizing the potential of showing videos and playing music on stamps. I mean, the iPod Nano is slightly bigger then a stamp.
I am also surprised Google hasn't figured this out yet, all that wasted space on a letter that Google could put ad words and Google adds on. That stamp is just dying to display Google content.
Also, think of the potential of not having to buy extra postage stamps when the Post office increases their delivery charges on a monthly basis. You could setup a stamp website that takes people's credit cards and automatically bills them for the increase in delivery charges and update the stamps face value, while the letter is CURRENTLY in transit! The post office could change their postage fees as easily as Gas companies change the price of oil!!!! No more returned mail for insufficient funds
Why is this so laughable, I mean, they thought TV on cellphones would work, why not stamps?
I don't know, I think the telecommunications industry has exhausted all their ideas for cell phones, I mean, TV on cellphones was so last week. The future is in Stamps I tell you, STAMPS!
I haven't thought of anything clever to put here, but then again most of you haven't either.
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.
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make install -not war
Why the hostility? I don't like SUVs, or jacked-up 4x4 pickup trucks, or things that imply some sense of "utility" but in practice have about zero.
At least you don't live in Oregon, where "fairness" in road usage will soon be that, at least for cars, road taxes are calculated by miles driven on them, because there are "too many" Priuses and other more fuel-efficient cars on the roads, and revenues from fuel taxes in Oregon are "going down".
Which is odd, really. Most of Oregon's road miles are in very rural areas, except for perhaps the I-5 corridor between Portland and Eugene (but you don't have to go very far off of I-5 to find dirt roads...). Even driving in Portland, there are still relatively few Priuses and other hybrids. Lots of cars, trucks, minivans and SUVs.
What it really indicates is that most people in Oregon are pretty averse to taxes. Hell, I moved here rather than Washington so as to not pay god-damned sales tax. Given the choice, I'd much rather pay Oregon's personal income tax than Washington's sales tax, or both, like in California or many states in the midwest, like Wisconsin and Illinois.
So what will happen is that the Legislature will increase the gas tax (which they should, because larger vehicles eat up the roads more than smaller vehicles at a slightly geometric rate, not linear) which should encourage less unnecessary driving of unnecessary large vehicles. That, or get rid of the flat-rate car registration fee, and go to vehicle weight or something. Yeah, I have a big pickup truck (which I would register then as a farm vehicle), a Honda Odyseey and a Saturn wagon, so I'm promoting something that would bite me in the ass a little bit, because it would be simpler to implement, not require me to install (and probably buy...) GPS systems in my cars, etc.
While it's nice living in Oregon, state affairs in Oregon are pretty screwed up. At least in Illinois (and California), things were corrupt, but most stuff still got taken care of, even if you knew someone was getting rather rich at the state's expense. In Oregon? No, there is as much bureaucratic fighting amongst state offices as there is in the Legislature, and all the while, shit just stays broken and dysfunctional, and people argue and worry about red herrings to no end, and various tails do their damnest to wag the dog to pieces.
One of the local sports talking heads was blathering on about the Columbia River and the dams on it on Saturday. "Drop the dams, save the salmon!" and essentially arguing that agriculture does nothing for the economies of Washington and Oregon (and Idaho), that the state should do nothing to protect ag. Hmm... running fishing tours brings how much into these states' economies per year? Sorry, saving sports fishing should be one of the lesser worries for this region, because it's not suddenly going to blossom into a billion-dollar chunk of the region's economies, ever.
Triple play DSL installations are now the norm in both Europe and parts of Asia. They are mostly based on the G.992.5 ADSL2+ standard, the DSLAMs and CPE boxes have been available since 2002, with a big uptake seen about 2 years ago.
Technically, there is 24 Mbps of downstream bandwidth available (with no voice band splitters, it can use the whole bandwidth of the copper pair). G.992 also allows for multiple ATM pipes, so a service provider can reserve 16kbps for VOIP, 1-3 Mbps for a single MPEG-4 video stream, and the rest for internet. There is also the concept of separate interleave delays for each ATM circuit, so a voice channel can have a low delay, video a high delay, and internet can have either a high delay with higer bandwidth or low delay with lower bandwidth (for the gamerz oh-so-important ping times). Even customers out at the far limits of DSL still have a few hundred Kbps of internet left after the VOIP and TV feeds.
Video channel switching is done via a reserved communications channel between the set-top CPE box and the DSLAM, as you zap through the channels, the DSLAM chooses the video stream. The major downside is that there needs to be a fibre feed with all the channels going through every DSLAM, a couple of Gbit/sec worth of streaming video for the companies who have 300+ channels available. The video quality I've seen on every system is pretty poor, MPEG artifacts everywhere, skips and delays, and no synchro between audio and video streams.
I've just returned from a working vacation in the U.S., and I was stunned at the primitiveness of the DSL infrastructure. The big 3 monopolies own the copper, Local Loop Unbundling (or naked DSL) is almost non-existant, download caps as bad as Australia, AUPs forbid all kinds of things like leaving an SSH server on your home machine for remote access. I'm glad to be back in the first world, internet-wise.
At CeBIT last week, everyone was talking VDSL2. European providers with large ADSL2+ networks are upgrading to 50Mbps VDSL2. All the chinese manufacturers were showing off working VDSL2 systems based on conexant and broadcom chipsets.
the AC
Hemos is like...sci-fi fans;he thinks technology is cool, but he hasn't bothered to understand the science it's based on