May 2006 Archives
Dear Reader,
Today is my last day as editorial director for TMCnet. It's been a privilege to hold this position since October 2004 and to see TMCnet grow in prominence and strength as a technology web site.
Since October 2004, TMCnet has:
- grown from 2,799,911 page views to 16,838,125 page views per month
- grown from 265,588 unique visitors to 1,053,840 unique visitors per month
- dropped its Alexa ranking from 10,925 to 1,347 (on Alexa, dropping is good, and this figure means TMCnet is approaching the top 1,000 web sites in the world)
This growth is due to the skills and hard work of the TMCnet web team, as well as the editorial, administrative, marketing and sales people who support it -- and to the wisdom, diligence and tenacity of the TMC executive leadership. I thank all of these people for allowing me to be a part of the TMCnet phenomenon for the past 20 months.
In case you are wondering, I will be moving away from the New England area and plan to do consulting and freelancing, especially in the area of organizational innovation. If you would like to keep in touch, please visit my current projects:
Broad Mountain Associates -- http://www.broadmountain.com
The Reluctant Geek blog -- http://www.reluctantgeek.com
The Reluctant Guru blog -- http://www.reluctantguru.com
Thanks for following this blog. Two more entries should be appearing tomorrow morning, reporting on some breaking news from a major technology company having to do with its activities in the digital content arena.
Regards,
AB -- 5/30/06
From time to time over the past couple of years, I have received press releases from Radio Free Asia, such as this one today: "China Sentences Dongzhou Villagers For Their Part in Clashes."
Many of these releases seemed to be stories about violent clashes in rural China that were not widely reported outside the country. I was puzzled by these reports until I read "Inside the Pitchfork Rebellion" in Time magazine. It turns out to be quite an interesting story, connected with China's rapid economic development.
As I understand it, rural protesters in China are claiming that local government officials are selling communal land out from under them to get money from developers. Protests have led to violence and the jailing of dissenters, who say they have very little legal recourse within the conflict.
If you're interested in the topic of globalization, it makes a fascinating story to look into.
AB -- 5/25/06
Here's a very interesting article based on a speech given recently by Lieutenant General Steven Boutelle, who is CIO/G6 of the U.S. Army. The article describes the Army's IT strategy, and the general had some very interesting things to say about how they are implementing IP communications in all of their operations.
Here is a partial quote from the piece I found particularly fascinating:
"Everything over IP [EoIP] is important. As we convert from circuit-based to IP-based systems, some good things happen. Some of the first people to do that in our community were the Joint Communications Support Element at McDill AFB and the Joint Special Operations Command. They did this on their own initiative. They said they were tired of circuit-based switches, and were going to convert to converged IP—data, voice and video teleconferencing. It’s all IP-based. What do you gain by that? First of all, after they went to EoIP, it’s now only a three-man or –woman team, which is scalable, flexible, costs less, has a smaller footprint, and you get more capability. These packages are deployed in Iraq and Afghanistan today. You also reduced your lift requirement from four C-130s to one …."When you move to an EoIP world, which everyone is doing across the DoD at different speeds, you start to get all this capability. So what we did in the Army was to look at what they had done very closely. Then we sent teams into Iraq to ask what the warfighter really wanted. What do you really need here—not what you need for a fight on the North German plain but what do you need in a fast-moving force that is heavily dependent on video, BFT and UAV? The Joint Network Node [JNN] is what they came up with and we built and provided it in 18 months, with the budget supplementals, to eight divisions in the Army—80 percent of the Army; and many of the National Guard and Reserve units have been converted or are converting. Today you can go into Iraq and Afghanistan, and find the 10th Mountain Division, 4th Infantry Division and 101st Airborne, with an all IP-based C2 system. One year ago, they were all Mobile Subscriber Equipment—circuit-based."The Army deployed JNNs to the 3rd ID when they went to Iraq for the second time and gave them IP systems. The additional divisions I just mentioned were “funded and provided” with the JNN systems prior to going into Iraq, and other units are being funded and provided as we speak, along with the associated National Guard and Reserve units. The last two divisions to be fielded will complete 10 active component divisions, and then we will have 100 percent of Army active divisions and the associated National Guard and Reserve divisions with EoIP. That means they’re all running Voice over IP, Red Switch, VTC, SVTC, SIPR and NIPR networks, and classified and unclassified video, and we put in a Vantage Switch so that they can talk to anyone who’s still on a legacy system. It’s efficient, commercial-off-the-shelf equipment. It’s easy to do and it’s cheaper."When you can go from four C-130s to one C-130 and improve capability, you’re in business. That is a great success."
Rich Tehrani says that this morning CNBC had a report on the expected Vonage IPO -- see more details in today's AP story. The price is expected to be set tonight at $16 to $18 per share selling 31.25 million shares.
Our colleague, long-time VoIP blogger Tom Keating, had scathing criticism for Vonage in his blog entry, "Time to dump Vonage," a few days ago. Tom has been using Vonage almost since it began, but has been extremely disappointed by the company's service lately. Tom says, "Two years ago, I talked about the 'death knell' for Vonage and other 'one trick pony' VoIP providers that rode the open Internet and didn't provide the last-mile data connection, so I did see this coming .... I wrote about the fall of Vonage to the triple play providers as something that's coming soon, so hold on while I go ring the death knell bell for Vonage."
Wow, those are striking words to read on the eve of Vonage's IPO; the phrase "one trick pony" strikes me as apt. I do think the IPO is an important development for the VoIP industry, but it's hard for me to feel excited about the long-term prospects for a company whose service is marketed as just a cheaper alternative to POTS.
Given the potential of IP communications, simply using the technology to cobble together a poor imitation of regular phone service reminds me of early television broadcasts that were just talking-head radio shows performed in front of a camera.
This quote from today's Reuters story reflects the sentiments of quite a few other comments I've seen today about the expected IPO:
"Vonage has acknowledged that it may never be profitable and is viewed with skepticism by many analysts, who cite the growing competition it faces in providing voice-over-Internet protocol (VoIP) services."'We haven't liked the offering since we first saw the registration,' said David Menlow, president of IPOfinancial.com. 'There are so many other companies out there that can deploy this strategy or this product in a heartbeat.'"
Comtex Business is reporting that a bipartisan group of U.S. House members has introduced H.R. 5417, the "Internet Freedom and Nondiscrimination Act of 2006" -- see "Sensenbrenner, Conyers Introduce Bipartisan Net Neutrality Legislation."
House Judiciary Committee Chairman F. James Sensenbrenner, Jr. (R-Wis.), who introduced the legislation with Ranking Member John Conyers, Jr. (D-Mich.), is quoted as saying:
"This legislation is a necessary step to protect consumers and other Internet users from possible anti-competitive and discriminatory conduct by broadband providers. The FCC recently reported that 98 percent of American consumers get their high speed broadband from either a cable company or a DSL provider. This virtual duopoly creates an environment that is ripe for anti-competitive abuses, and for which a clear antitrust remedy is urgently needed.
"This legislation will provide an insurance policy for Internet users against being harmed by broadband network operators abusing their market power to discriminate against content and service providers. While I am not opposed to providers responsibly managing their networks and providing increased bandwidth to those consumers who wish to pay for it, I am opposed to providers giving faster, more efficient access to certain service providers at the expense of others. This legislation will ensure that this type of discriminatory behavior will not take place, and will help to continue the tradition of innovation and competition that has defined the Internet."
Today's report says that the new legislation would be an amendment to the Clayton Act, which (if I understand correctly) is a 1914 amendment to the 1890 Sherman Antitrust Act. H.R. 5417 would, the report says, require network providers to:
1) interconnect with the facilities of other network providers on a reasonable and nondiscriminatory basis;
2) operate their network in a reasonable and nondiscriminatory manner such that non-affiliated providers of content, services and applications have an equal opportunity to reach consumers; and
3) refrain from interfering with users' ability to choose the lawful content, services and applications they want to use.
AB -- 5/18/06
If you're planning to attend Globalcomm 2006 in Chicago the week of June 4-8, 2006, you'll want to bookmark TMCnet's Globalcomm News Snapshot page to keep up with news and announcements.
TMC is sponsoring an IMS party at the conference on Monday, June 5. Globalcomm replaces Supercomm as the annual event for next-generation communications sponsored by the Telecommunications Industry Association (TIA).
AB -- 5/18/06
An interesting article appeared from The Baltimore Sun today, citing sources who say that the National Security Agency developed and rejected a technology during the late-1990s that would have done a better job sifting phone data and that would have done so in a way that would not have violated U.S. citizens' privacy -- see "NSA rejected system that sifted phone data legally."
The release of this information seems timed to embarrass Michael V. Hayden, Pres. Bush's nominee for CIA director, facing Senate confirmation hearings today. Hayden was head of the NSA at the time the alternative technology, ThinThread, was rejected in favor of the supposedly less-rigorous program that is now generating criticism.
The Sun says the rejected ThinThread technology would have:
-- Used more-sophisticated methods of sorting through massive phone and e-mail data to identify suspect communications.
-- Identified U.S. phone numbers and other communications data and encrypted them to ensure caller privacy.
-- Employed an automated auditing system to monitor how analysts handled the information, in order to prevent misuse and improve efficiency.
-- Analyzed the data to identify relationships between callers and chronicle their contacts. Only when evidence of a potential threat had been developed would analysts be able to request decryption of the records
From news reports today it looks to me as if Hayden wishes everybody would just stop talking about all this and leave the intelligence agencies alone to do their jobs -- see "Hayden Defends Legality of NSA Surveillance" on Fox News, which quotes Hayden as saying that "the intelligence community in general 'has too much become the football of American political discourse. CIA needs to get out of the news as source or subject and focus on protecting the American people by acquiring secrets' from U.S. enemies."
It does seem likely that all this public attention must be inhibiting the ability of U.S. intelligence organizations to do their jobs. And correct me if I'm wrong, but I don't remember hearing specific reports of American citizens being harassed, unfairly targeted or mistreated as a result of the NSA surveillance. But of course the potential is there, and that I guess is the point.
American society demands a lot of transparency and accountability on the part of its government, and the demand for accountability is in part in response to the abuses of the past -- the FBI's machinations against Martin Luther King come to mind, for example.
It brings to mind a problem I've thought of in connection with business ethics. Often business interests complain about government regulation, and about the interference of consumer and environmental advocates and other special interest groups. But it seems to me that if industries did a better job of self-regulation, they would be less likely to face a hue and cry from the public, along with restrictive legislation.
The same might be true of security services and other agencies of government. It's just a thought.
AB -- 5/18/06
Is your company a communications technology innovator? Here's an opportunity to get some recognition. I've just learned that the 2006 TMC Labs Innovation Awards deadline for Internet Telephony magazine is just days away, May 25, 2006.
Follow this link to go to the online application form.
Here's a good writeup from Tom Keating, TMC Labs founder, explaining what the award is all about:
What are the TMC Labs Innovation Awards?
The TMC Labs Innovation Awards honor products that demonstrate raw innovation, unique features, and significant contributions toward improving communications technology. While innovation is frequently a question of firsts, often it is taking an existing idea and improving upon it or looking at it from a slightly different perspective. Challenging established standards, and then introducing different approaches to achieve distinctive results certainly helps to define innovation within this industry.
The TMC Labs Innovation Awards would not be granted only to the "best" (or best-selling) products in each category, but instead to those demonstrating raw innovation, uniqueness, and representing a significant contribution to the industry. It is our intent that this will be TMC's most prestigious award.
In fact, TMC Labs chooses only a few select products that we consider truly innovative. The TMC Labs engineers have extensive knowledge of the communications, Internet telephony, and call center industries from testing products as well as meeting with vendors and attending tradeshows. As such, in the first annual TMC Labs Innovation Awards, we selected winners solely based on our own knowledge of innovative products in these industries. Now we have decided to formalize the process and have an online application for companies to submit what they feel is an innovative product. Of these applications, only a select few are chosen. The ones that are chosen are given an extensive and detailed write-up within one of our publications.
We should point out that not all the winners submitted an application; some of the winners were selected by the TMC Labs engineers without an application. However, with thousands of products out there, we cannot guarantee that we will examine your product without an application. Only by applying do you bring your company/product to our attention and guarantee that it will be considered for this award. We should also point out that we do not need to actually test the product for a vendor to apply for this award. TMC Labs does extensive research to determine what truly is "innovative."
We should mention that the TMC Labs Innovation Awards are published in two magazines: Internet Telephony, and Customer Inter@ction Solutions. Applicants may apply to both magazines, but when selecting the winners TMC Labs decides which magazine would be the best fit for the actual award write-up. It should be stated that the TMC Labs Innovation Award is the same exact prestigious award in both magazines.
We realize the difficulty in developing a first-class product that integrates several components into one unified product suite. With the convergence of voice, data, and various media types (fax, e-mail, chat) comes increasing complexity, often resulting in products that we consider to be engineering marvels. We tip our hats to the engineers and developers of the award winners.
AB -- 5/18/06
Earlier this week, Peter Svensson, technology writer for the Associated Press, voiced a concern that is leading the country toward a multi-tiered Internet scenario, under which ISPs would be able to charge more for users or for content providers who take up more bandwidth.
In his article "High-Def Could Choke Internet, ISPs Fear," Svensson says ISPs and cable and phone companies claim that the Internet isn't built for transfers of video at rates anything like the volumes common among U.S. TV-watchers. As things stand now, the Internet has no problem accommodating normal web browsing, emails and the occasional file download. "Small clips are fine," Svensson writes, "but TV-quality and especially high-definition programming could make the Internet choke." Not all experts agree that usage is likely to overtake capacity any time soon, but the possibility has providers worried -- and lobbying heavily for a non-neutral Internet.
Recently some commentators have suggested that peer-to-peer (P2P) file-sharing could offer a solution to the problem, since it decentralizes file transfers, instead of requiring them to travel through networks in large concentrated streams. I first ran into this idea in Robert X. Cringely's essay, "Why P2P Is the Future of Media Distribution Even If ISPs Have Yet to Figure It Out." (See my March 16, 2006, entry, "P2P Enables Large-File Media Distribution.")
In fact, this appears to be the thinking behind the announcement from last week that the Warner Brothers movie studio is contracting with file-sharing company BitTorrent to distribute movies and TV programs using its P2P software -- see BusinessWeek's article "BitTorrent Goes Hollywood." Here's how the article describes the delivery strategy:
"Distributed delivery is attractive because the technology downloads files by collecting bits and pieces of it from many sources, rather than putting the burden on just one source. That means it costs next to nothing for content owners to distribute movies or music -- a huge advantage over the current approach, in which files are streamed over individual servers and the massive amount of bandwidth required for video can run up huge bills."
P2P software is a fitting and natural application strategy for the decentralized Internet that works best when the intelligence is placed at the edges. And In spite of its widespread use for illegal music downloads, I've always felt that P2P file-sharing was an intriguing technology that would eventually lend itself to legal business models.
AB -- 5/16/06