Where is the Network API?

At the recent "Rethinking Communications" conference, several panelists commented about the difficulty of creating anything like an application program interface to "the network." APIs are a common way to hide the details of any application or function from software developers. The idea is to compartmentalize functions enough that a developer doesn't have to know how everything works; only what is necessary to invoke some function or operation, or add some function.

Right now the problem is that the "network" is full of subsystems that aren't actually unified enough to present a single API to any third party developer. IP Multimedia Subsystem will help, and right now Session Initiation Protocol comes as close as anything to being an API, though the analogy is rough.

The other issue: programmers, almost by nature, will stress test the limits of any network demarcation a network wishes to expose. "Give them an inch; they'll take a mile," Trevor Baca, Jaduka VP, says.

That isn't likely to raise comfort levels on the carrier side. But some middle ground has to be reached if carriers are to benefit from skills third party developers can put to work.

Cox Ups Speed in Phoenix

Cox Communications is bumping up the speeds of its cable modem service in Phoenix. For customers with Cox's Preferred service, downloads will move from 7 Mbps per second to 9 Mbps, with upload speeds increasing from 512 kilobytes per second to 768 kbps.

For the Premier service, customers will get 15 Mbps with burst of up to 20 Mbps for download speeds with uploads starting at 1.5 Mbps and capable of bursts up to 2 Mbps.

The additional speed comes at no additional cost. Qwest Communications is upping its digital subscriber line service to 12 Mbps for its lower-cost service and 20 Mbps for its higher-cost service.

Still, there are some who argue the United States is "falling behind" other nations, suffering from inadequate supply, high prices, slow speeds, or all of the above. One can argue about that.

One cannot argue the problem is not being addressed. Speeds keep climbing, for the same amount of money, everyplace telcos and cable compete with each other.

iPod Still Top Seller, Store Personnel Report

In a recent Tickermine survey of stores selling MP3 players in June 2008, including Best Buy, Radio Shack and Circuit City, the iPod emerged as the best-selling MP3 player by 82 percent of those polled.

Microsoft's Zune 80 GB was said to be best selling by 12 percent of respondents.The SanDisk Sansa Clip 2GB was said to be the best seller by six percent of respondents.

Some 62 percent of respondents say a dedicated music player is a better choice than a music-capble phyone, but 38 percent reported they preferred music-capable mobile phones because it means one less item in your pocket to contend with.

Dell to Become a Managed Service Provider

Dell plans to launch a managed services initiative aimed at allowing channel partners and Dell itself to remotely maintain and troubleshoot small business networks, servers and desktops. Two recent Dell acquisitions -- Everdream and Silverback Technologies -- will provide the foundation for Dell's SaaS push, says Joe Panettieri is Editorial Director of Nine Lives Media.

The managed services push is supposed to happen late in 2008 or early in 2009. Dell intends to become a Master Managed Service Provider (Master MSP), which means IT consulting firms will be able to leverage Dell's own network operation centers (NOCs) to manage customer networks.

When even hardware manufacturers become service providers, how long can service providers wait to become data specialists, to a greater or lesser degree?

Android Phone from T-Mobile: 4th Quarter

When you finally can buy an Android phone, it first will be available from T-Mobile, in all likelihood. T-Mobile is said to want a device to sell in the fourth quarter.

T-Mobile Offers $10 a Month VoIP

T-Mobile @ Home is a new nationally available over-the-top consumer VoIP service pricied at $10 a month. There isn't much of a catch, aside from the fact that the service only is available to T-Mobile wireless customers on plans costing $40 a month or more.

It isn't so much that T-Mobile wants to be in the over-the-top VoIP business. It is that it needs something jazzy to keep its mobile customers loyal. The company hopes $10 a month home phone service is that sort of thing.

The new service is different from the Hotspot @ Home offering T-Mobile also has been testing. That is a dual-mode mobile service that allows some mobile phone models to connect to an in-home Wi-Fi router.

The real effort here is to insulate T-Mobile from churn. After all, it can't offer the iPhone or 3G service yet.

Charter Backs Away From Targeted Ads

Nothing in the targeted ad business is easy. Witness Charter Communications, which has backed off a plan to insert advertisements onto user Web pages because of objections from privacy advocates.

There's always something waiting to disrupt an Internet or communications business plan.

Twitter gets Jeff Bezos Investment

Valleywag says Twitter, has received an investment from Amazon founder and CEO Jeff Bezos as well as Bijan Sabet of Spark Capital. Did I run over120 characters?

IT Seen as Boring

More than 60 percent of college graduates with degrees in areas other than information technology think a job in IT would be "boring," despite its good career prospects, according to the Career Development Organisation, and reported by ComputerWeekly.com.

Of course, other organizations have issues of that sort, even within the software and computer science graduate pool. If one is a bright, ambitious programmer, would such a person prefer to work at a company like Google or a device manufacturer or network equipment firm? I think we can figure that one out without taking a survey.

Virgin Mobile to Acquire Helio, Says Financial Times

Virgin Mobile USA will acquire Helio, the mobile phone operation controlled by SK Telecom and originally launched as a joint venture between SK Telecom and Earthlink. What both brands have in common is a positioning in the "hipper" segment of the youth market, as well as struggling businesses.

Virgin Mobile has more than five million prepaid customers. Helio had a bit fewer than 200,000 postpaid customers at the beginning of 2008.

Mobility, just like wired voice and data, is a scale game. What the industry is seeing is consolidation in just about every segment of the market, in large part to achieve scale. In the global international voice business, margins keep dropping, forcing carriers to sell lots more volume to make up for skinnier margins.

Over time, even the largest global carriers will find they either must bulk up or outsource those operations to carriers that can achieve huge scale.

Android Learns What Others Have

According to Wall Street Journal reporters Jessica Vascellaro and Amol Sharma, the Android development effort is proving more protracted than originally expected. Nokia and other executives at mobile device firms using competing operating systems had suggested this would be the case.

Google executives also indicate that custom applications some of the participaing mobile providers want to provide also are taking more time than expected, the Wall Street Journal reporters say.

Sprint, for example, wants its own branded services based on Android. Given the other issues Sprint is tackling, it isn't so surprising that development is taking longer than expected.

Sprint is now considering scrapping plans for an Android phone for its current third-generation broadband network and developing one that will work on the faster "4G" network it is helping to fund along with several partners, including Google, the reporters say.

To be fair, lots of other talented, well-endowed technology firms have stumbled upon such obstacles themselves in creating VoIP services such as IP-based business phone systems, to cite one example. There just are lots of nuances that are not immediately obvious.

Android will get through those issues, just as other developers have. It simply will take a while.

Nokia Buys Symbian

One of the themes at the Voice Peering Forum meeting has been the absolutely central role applications now play in the whole communications business. So now comes word that mobile device giant Nokia will acquire the 52 percent of mobile software specialist Symbian that it does not already own.

As identified with Nokia and Symbian is, there are no strategic shifts here. Nokia simply owns outright its operating system. What is more important is what companion moves suggest.

Nokia and a number of other electronics makers are forming the Symbian Foundation to drive the development of Web applications for use by consumers on cell phones. Again, note the trend: application development fostered by handset manufacturers, matching the application development communications service providers know they also must foster.

The foundation plans to provide a unified platform that has a common user interface framework and that will be available for all foundation members under a royalty-free license, Nokia says.

Access, IP Transit: Where's the Rub?

So we've been kicking around lots of issues around telecom industry transformation at the Voice Peering Forum June 23 and 24, 2008. An attendee from Telecom New Zealand pointed out something interesting.

"In the U.S. market, contestants seem to spend a lot of time fighting over rights to use or lease the access network," he said. "That's not where the rub is, which is in IP transit."

That might strike you as an incongruous statement. After all, isn't long-haul a fairly easy thing to build? Isn't there lots of fiber?

Well, yes, there's a substantial amount of fiber, even though lots of it might not be in the right places, or lots of it concentrated inside the same cable sheaths, on the same routes.

But there's another issue, not related to fiber but to IP transit costs. If a service provider owns its own facilities, there is not much of a problem on that score. No matter how much Internet bandwidth is required, the incremental cost of supplying that demand is controllable.

That is definitively not the case for a service provider that does not own its own wide area network, and has to lease capacity in the form of IP transit. In that case, it is quite expensive if a service provider's users start to download or stream significant amounts of video.

That isn't to say access is not a crucial problem. For many contestants it is a key problem. But let's not forget that IP transit costs are growing as video consumption is growing. Sooner or later, larger service providers who do not own their own WANs will start looking at buying them or building them. That's one good way to save money on spiraling IP transit costs.

Consumer Video Drives 1/2 of Bandwidth by 2012

If Cisco is correct, and bandwidth keeps growing about 50 to 60 percent a year, and consumers keep adding video behaviors, then the easy extrapolation is that half of global bandwidth will be used for consumer video apps of one sort or another by 2012.

The challenge for wide area network and access providers is that video provides very-low revenue per bit, compared to any other service.

Lots more bandwidth, provided very economically, is going to be the business challenge.

Video on Every Display Surface?

There isn't much doubt that video is going to drive the next wave of global bandwidth consumption. There are bigger questions about the business models underneath all that video, however.

Forrester Research analyst James L. McQuivey, for example, envisages consumers being confronted with “a dozen video platforms per day,” according to Seeking Alpha. But there's more to it than that.

Forrester thinks video will become so compelling that enterprises will “broadcast” video continuously from inside the enterprise. Companies have to have a strategy for communicating every message--internal or external--using video.

“Once video becomes this easy to produce, deliver, store, and share, every agent in society will not only want to participate but will have to participate in order to have a shot at reaching people with its products and services,” McQuivey contends.

Every video surface will become a marketing platform, he predicts. When nearly every surface in your environment can display video, marketers will pay a pretty penny to show up at the bottom of a food bowl or in a bathroom mirror, where their product marketing message will be far more relevant than it is on a TV today.

“The only broker of this ad space in your home is you: We envision ad networks one day paying you for the right to aggregate your ad experiences,” he argues.

That might be stretching matters a bit. What seems more certain is that global bandwidth now is driven by video.