Do Mobile Phones Cause Cancer?

Though the evidence is contested, indeed many will argue highly contested, research studies on the effect of mobile phone use on cancer, especially those funded by the industry, continue to suggest there is no danger. Indeed, some scientists argue that non-ionizing radiation typical of cell phone use could not cause cancer. The problem is that not every study suggests there is no correlation.

Regular use of mobile telephones does increase the risk of developing tumors, a new study by Israeli researchers published in the American Journal of Epidemiology finds.

An extract of the report reported by Israel's Yedoit Aharonot newspaper put the risk of developing a parotid gland tumor nearly 50 percent higher for frequent mobile phone users, those who talk more than 22 hours a month.

The risk was still higher if users clamped the phone to the same ear, did not use hands-free devices or were in rural areas.

The study included 402 benign and 58 malignant incident cases of parotid gland tumor diagnosed in Israel at age 18 years or more, in 2001 to 2003.

The research was led by Dr Siegal Sadetzki, a cancer and radiation expert at the Chaim Sheba Medical Centre in Israel and as part of a World Health Organisation project.

Note that levels of usage identified as dangerous were 22 hours a month. As with many other studies, the potential danger has to be kept in perspective: sometimes it takes really unusual dosages of an irritant to trigger a negative result. In this case, we are talking about 44 minutes of use in a 30-day month. That won't appear excessive to many dispassionate observers.

Some researchers (such as Friedman and Richter)point out that there is a high degree of potential conflict of interest in the funding of studies showing that cell phone usage is safe.

Studies published in the New England Journal of Medicine and the Journal of the American Medical Association during 2001, for example, found a strong association for studies whose authors had an economic conflict of interest and also reported there is no danger from cell phone use. The association between industry-funded research and findings of "no threat" were associated with a greater than 99.9 percent level of confidence.

Maybe texting isn't such a bad precaution?

Observers cite:

1. Schutz J, Boehler E, Berg G, et al. Cellular phones, cordless phones, and the risks of glioma and meningioma (Interphone Study Group, Germany). American Journal of Epidemiology 2006;163:512–20.

2. Hardell L, Carlberg M, Mild KH. Case-control study of the association between the use of cellular and cordless telephones and malignant brain tumors diagnosed during 2000–2003.

3. Hardell L, Carlberg M, Hansson Mild K. Pooled analysis of two case-control studies on the use of cellular and cordless telephones and the risk of benign brain tumours diagnosed during 1997–2003. Int J Oncol 2006;28:509–18.

4. Friedman LS, Richter ED. Relationship between conflicts of interest and research results. Journal of Gen. Internal Medicine 2004;19:51–6.

Indian Wireless Firms Structurally Separate

Three Indian Wireless companies have concluded that owning and operating layer one infrastructure is not essential for retail operations.

Bharti Infratel Ltd., a unit of Bharti Airtel Ltd., is merging its telecom tower business with Vodafone Essar Ltd. and Idea Cellular Ltd.

The three companies will form an independent tower company called Indus Towers Ltd. that will provide passive infrastructure services in India. Bharti and Vodafone Essar will hold 42 percent each of the company, and Idea will own the remaining 16 percent.

Passive infrastructure services include towers, shelters, cooling systems, power supply and other items that enable telecom systems to work.

The new firm will merge the passive infrastructure assets of the three companies across 16 telecom territories in India and will initially have about 70,000 telecom sites, the statement said.

The move parallels "structural separation" (creation of a legally distinct and separate wholesale facilities company) more than "functional separation" (creation of an owned wholesale facilities company). Still, the move is interesting given the move to functional separation in Europe, where wholesale facilities are run by one entity, and all retail providers lease capacity and features to run their retail operations.

The move by the three wireless service providers mirrors a broader change in the global communications business from a completely vertically-integrated model to a partially horizontally-integrated model. Basically, communications networks increasingly operate the way data networks do, with applications running on top of facilities that are owned by many different entities in the value chain.

You might call this a move to more "open" networks, and indeed that is precisely what is happening, in small steps.

No Broadband Equality: Density Still Matters

Observers of both U.S. and U.K. efforts to stimulate innovation and competition in the core communications markets will note the vastly-different regulatory approaches. In the U.K. market, where satellite is a significant factor but cable is not, regulators have chosen an aggressive wholesale unbundled local loop regime.

The U.S. market has seen the same initial thrust, only to be followed by an alternate reliance on inter-modal competition between cable and telephone industries, rather than a primary reliance on wholesale, unbundled local loop.

So far, the U.K. market model has proven more friendly to competitors. But physical constraints still are an issue, irrespective of regulatory framework. In thinly-populated areas with low density, the cost of providing broadband remains hig

If BT’s 21st Century network provides evidence, it is that one does not change all access cost inputs simply because a network converts to IP in place of TDM protocols.

In fact, it appears that wholesale access cost for partners who want to use BT’s transmission network to serve rural or suburban customers will be as much as three times higher than similar features will cost in dense urban areas, says Keith McMahon, a U.K.-based blogger.

There’s nothing terribly surprising about this. Infrastructure always costs more, per household, per business or per person in lightly-populated areas.

There’s simply more construction cost and physical media to support, and less ability to share common costs (ports or software licenses, for example), in less-dense areas. IP doesn’t change that.

The implications for competitive providers who lease access from BT and provide retail services to customers under their own names (analogous to U.S. competitive local exchange carriers) are clear enough. Competitors will choose to place their own facilities where customer density is greatest.

The largest nationwide providers, including Carphone Warehouse, Sky, Tiscali, O2 and Orange will find it worthwhile to interoperate at the Tier 1 MSAN level, which gives them coverage of 1,200 exchanges and about 70 percent or 17.7 million of the 25.3 million U.K. homes.

U.K. cable networks largely overlap the areas served by Tier 1 MSANs, for obvious reasons: that is where most of the customers are. Cable networks pass by around 11.8 million homes or 47 percent of total U.K. homes. As McMahon lays out the competitive scenario, about seven companies will contest for customers in 11.8 million homes, or just half the market.

About six companies likely will compete to serve 5.9 million homes or 23 percent of the market. In all likelihood, just one company, BT, will be in position to serve 7.6 million homes, or about 30 percent of total homes.

Population density and loop length still are key impediments to high-bandwidth services, no matter what the regulatory framework.

Web, Internet, Unanticipated Consequences

As John B. Horrigan, Pew Internet & American Life Project associate research director points out, the way people use the Internet today was not necessarily the way policymakers were told people would use it more than a decade ago.

In 1993, thinking focused much more on applications related to education, health care and improving democratic discourse, for example, that would use two-way video.

Today, online interactivity means something different. It is commerce, transactions, content gathering and, unexpectedly for many, content production, or user-created or user-generated media.

Simply put, the way content, information, gossip and tastes get produced and distributed is changing. That sort of thing used to be highly centralized and expensive. These days, anybody can speak; anybody can publish; anybody can participate.

That implies a different sort of information economy in the future; a new way of getting messages out; a new set of influencers to work with.

Also, the emergence of user-generated content also shows another common artifact of transformational technology: it gets used in ways even its creators did not anticipate. We should now be preparing for something else that frequently occurs with technology transformations.

Change seems less significant than many would anticipate, in the early stages. But the changes are far more significant as the shift takes hold. We are about to hit that stage.

As one example, what do you think the primary purpose of an enterprise data network is today? What do you think the purpose will be in five years? How do enterprises create networks today? How do you think they will be created in five years?

Tom Austin over at the Gartner Group might surprise you with his answers. He argues that the primary purpose of an enterprise network in five years will be to support social networking (think Facebook). And where enterprises these days tend to create and operate their own data networks, in the future they will find themselves outsourcing a number of those functions, if not the entire basic architecture, to "compute in the cloud" suppliers.

The reason social networking turns out to be so important for enterprises is that it allows very-large organizations, or highly-distributed groups of people, to discover what skills and insights the other people have, in ways that have been impossible up to this point.

One researcher or consulting team might be working on a problem someplace, and not know that somebody else, someplace else, has insight that can help solve the problem at hand. Social networking will help organizations and people create those links. Today, much of that insight is simply trapped inside organizations because nobody can conveniently discover whether it exists and where it exists.

The move to a highly-distributed computing framework is driven by mobility. When most people are mobile or distributed, a highly-decentralized computing architecture, assuming only the existence of Web browsers and broadband access, is highly useful and efficient.

Google Docs & Spreadsheets Use up 84%

After a year, the data seems to suggest that users are figuring out how to use Google Docs and Spreadsheets, according to Compete data. Usage has been up sharply since June 2007, for example. In its first full year, Google Docs and Spreadsheets has seen an 84 percent year-over-year increase.

So why use Google Docs and Spreadsheets? Some people might like the fact that usage is free. Others might like the fact that Docs and Spreadsheets is easy to use. More important, perhaps, is the online sharing and collaboration aspect, which seems to be on the verge of greater importance in today’s workplace.

Personally, I use Docs and Spreadsheets because I do a lot of blogging, and Microsoft Word seems frequently to require translation to "text" to post cleanly on some sites. If I am going to have to do that, I'm simply not going to bother with Word.

Which Future for Telcos?

What name would you choose to describe "who you are" if you were an executive at any leading incumbent telecom company? Sure, you might come up with "converged communications and entertainment provider" or something like that, but the term is unsatisfying and probably will confuse most mass market customers in any case. BT already is trying the "information and communications" company tagline. The problem with such efforts as it isn't so clear how the tags differentiate "telcos" from large system integrators, large software houses offering hosted services, cable companies and possibly others.

"Experience provider" is a buzzword some toss around, but it lacks much descriptive power, beyond suggesting an approach to creating services and features. "Application provider" likewise hints at something important, but again is rather too broad to be useful.

But no matter how the nomenclature efforts finally resolve themselves, it seems clear enough that something important is changing. Even if the unique, irreplaceable assets any "telco" owns are the actual pipes and software used to create communications capabilities over those pipes, that will not be a key part of the future identity.

One way or the other, "applications" are going to figure into the description in some key way. Which is odd, in a way. To a very large degree, telcos have always been "application" providers, in the sense that voice is an application running on a network optimized to provide it.

The big change now is the sheer range of applications providers create or deliver.

The big conundrum is that the irreplaceable and unique assets "telcos" possess, aside from their regulatory prowess, is the pipes and associated software that makes those pipes useful. And yet it seems inevitable that "telcos" want to be known as something else more directly associated with "apps."

If you can configure this out, please, make sure all the rest of us know. Maybe somebody can capture the multiple values in one easy to remember phrase.

iPhone: Some Glimmers of Enterprise Adoption

SAP, Salesforce.com and scores of smaller developers are letting sales and finance teams work away from the office on their iPhones, says Reuters. SAP, in fact, has broke with precedent by introducing a version of its upcoming customer relationship management software for the iPhone before launching versions for mobile devices from Research in Motion and Palm.

In SAP's case, its own salespeople demanded it, according to Bob Stutz, SAP SVP.

There still are some issues many of us believe will be resolved over time. "Push" email and over-the-air synchronization are some of the features a really enterprise class iPhone would have to support. Integration with Microsoft Outlook is an issue, but basically a licensing deal.

Some potential business buyers probably are holding out for a model that runs on faster wireless networks, but that is a problem being resolved by Apple and at&t already.

One barrier some users might continue to have, though, is the relatively higher error rates for entering text, compared to other devices with keypads.