Fractals of Change

No More Landlines – Comm Forecast #1

By the end of President Obama's first term, there won't be any more copper landlines left in the country. One of the challenges facing the Federal Communications Commission and the new administration is how to deal with the fallout from the end of this venerable technology. It's gonna get ugly for some people – people who can't afford to do without communication – unless we're proactive about this problem.

Here's what's happening as you probably know. Young people don't bother with landlines (unless they live beyond cell coverage); they just use their mobile phones or Skype for voice communication. The slightly older set are buying cable's bundle of entertainment, Internet access, and VoIP. They cancel their landlines. People who have broadband access don't need the extra line they used to rent for their dial-up Internet access.

Verizon simply sold all of its copper plant in the three northern New England States to FairPoint. Verizon hadn't been investing in this plant and didn't want to put any more money in going forward. FairPoint, like Verizon and at&t, is losing access lines. In its latest financial results, it reported that access line equivalents are down 9.2% over the past year; total revenue is down as well.

In prime markets Verizon is replacing its copper infrastructure with fiber – one customer at a time; first are the most valuable customers but Verizon will move steadily down-market with its FiOS offer. FairPoint is making an impressive effort to add broadband access to areas where Verizon had not invested enough to make DSL work. FairPoint has also shown commendable willingness to move beyond traditional copper and use wireless to reach customers out of range of DSL. To compete with Cable's triple play, FairPoint has a loose bundle with DirecTV.

So look through the data points above to the trends. Revenue from POTS (Plain Old Telephone Service) is simply disappearing. The copper network is generating increasing revenue from DSL BUT cable appears to be winning the bandwidth war for Internet access and snaring the voice customers as well. Barring a technical breakthrough in the use of the copper infrastructure (one should NEVER bar a technical breakthrough), there are going to be less and less copper access lines in use. In the long term, this isn't a problem because there are better ways to communicate than over fixed copper wire. But we live now, not in the long term.

There are several public policy problems stemming from the decline of the copper network:

• At some point the carriers starting with some of the medium sized ones like FairPoint aren't going to be able to afford to maintain these networks with too few users. Network maintenance costs don't go down nearly as fast as the number of lines since you can't abandon any trunks as long as there are any customers attached to them. You still have to fix the lines when a tree falls on them even if most of the copper pairs in them are not in use. That's a big deal.
• Revenue for the Universal Service Fund is still predicated on the good old days when everyone used a landline. Cellular customers get a break. VoIP is a grey area. The USF will run out of money at a time when it may be getting more expensive to provide basic service to people in rural areas. The small rural carriers survive because of subsidies from both the USF and termination charges (which disappear when people don't use their landline phones).
• The USF mainly funds POTS. If POTS is kaput, there's nothing to subsidize.

All of these problems can be solved IFF they're recognized in time and if there's the political will-power to overcome the interests of those who have a stake in prolonging the declining status quo and postponing the future. For example, small rural telcos like the subsidies they get today and are not in as much immediate danger as their less-subsidized mid-sized brethren; they have substantial political clout with state and federal regulators. The duopoly of one large telco and one large cableco serving each area has resulted in some competition but not enough to stop Americans from having less bandwidth available at a higher price than most other developed countries. The duopoly has lobbyists to put it mildly.

The solution – at a high level – is breathtakingly simple. By the end of Obama's first term everyone in the US who has phone service today needs to have both an inexpensive mobile phone and broadband access (in some cases that'll be through the same device). The USF needs to shift its mission from subsidizing POTS to subsidizing connectivity. USF subsidies should go to consumers who are unable to pay for basic connectivity; not to telecommunications providers (rich people with homes in rural areas don't need an indirect subsidy; poor consumers should be able to choose which service provider to give their subsidy to). The revenue source for the USF either needs to move to the general tax base (good policy but bad politics) or at least be broadly-based across telecommunications services. There will need to be public investment in telecom infrastructure in rural areas but that may well be fundable by revenue bonds that get repaid from use rather than taxes; that's what we're planning in Vermont.

Do all that and the telecommunications future'll be bright. The cost of providing telecommunications is gonna come down very fast. More on that in an upcoming post.

Vonage Talk – Better Than I Thought

Vonage Talk can receive phone calls that are dialed to your home or business Vonage phone. Vonage Talk is a new "Alpha" service from Vonage which creates the ability to link PC client software to a Vonage account. This capability points the way – still a long way – to the end of outrageous cellular roaming costs.

Suppose you're in your hotel room somewhere on the other side of the world. Assuming you have a broadband connection (a good assumption because otherwise you would have had to leave the hotel room to get any work done), you fire up the Vonage Talk client on your PC. The Vonage Talk client is linked to whatever Vonage account you used to sign in. If the Vonage phone back home which belongs to that account rings, the Vonage client "rings" as well; it even gives you caller ID. If it's a call you want, you answer; if not, it goes to voice mail.

What's this "roaming" capability cost? Nothing! Same thing it costs you to make outgoing calls to many places using Vonage Talk wherever you are.

This is not the same as forwarding calls. When you do that, you have to pay for the outbound second leg of the call. Moreover, forwarding isn't practical to a hotel or office switchboard and you can't forward to an extension. But, if you are monitoring your home phone line on Vonage Talk, you can answer from a hotel room or borrowed office. Your privacy is maintained; the caller has no idea that you're not wherever your primary phone is.

BTW, this isn't the same as using Skype IN – it's better. Skype IN does allow people to reach you by calling a PSTN number but it's a special number only useful for Skype IN calls. Who wants to have yet one more number to give out?

Obviously this isn't as functional as getting calls on your mobile phone when you travel since you have to be connected somewhere with your PC on – could be a wifi hotspot – in order to make or receive calls. But there are two big advantages: you don't need to give anyone your mobile phone number in order to be reachable AND you eliminate potentially huge bills for cellular roaming – particularly if you're travelling internationally.

Blogged previously about Vonage Talk for outgoing call but mistakenly thought it wasn't useful for incoming. Hat tip to Dan Berninger for helping me get this straight.

Cordless or Wireless? Good Question

We don’t do spring here in Vermont so now it’s summer although there’s still plenty of snow gleaming in the mountains. Time for me to work outside (at least until we get our obligatory late season snowstorm).

My cordless phone is scratchy by the time I get out on the deck; it doesn’t like being that far from the base station. The WiFi isn’t great on the deck either.

I could move the base station for the cordless phone and install a repeater for the WiFi signal. Last year I used my antenna and high-power WiFi card to make WiFi work right outside. But that’s all a lot of trouble.

Instead I made my calls using my wireless (aka cellular) phone. And I put the EVDO USB modem in my computer and just used that for connectivity. Since I never use my 500 wireless minutes each month nor the 5 gigabytes per month included in my EVDO account, it doesn’t cost me anything incremental to be in my travel configuration while on the deck; and it’s a lot more convenient than making the house radios have good coverage outside.

So here’s the question: will there come a time when we don’t install our own little radios for voice and data at the end of the wires, cables, or fiber that comes into our houses? Will we just pick up the same signal from our carriers that we use when we’re traveling inside the house as well as on the deck and in the car?

Clearly WON’T happen unless the carriers lower the prices for cellular and EVDO and lift the volume limits. $99/month for unlimited talking on Verizon Wireless or AT&T is a lot more than $24.95 on Vonage which also includes reasonable rates on international calling. 5 gig would disappear pretty soon if I were doing my nightly over-the-net backups and watching MLB.com on EVDO. Moreover EVDO isn’t really fast enough for lots of web stuff.

The conventional wisdom is that eventually voice and data will come over a fiber into the house and then be distributed wirelessly thoughout the house and maybe the yard and that mobile needs will continue to be met by different technology at a higher price. Maybe the conventional wisdom is right but it’s always worth questioning.

I think there’s a strong probability that not just the last 100 feet but the whole last mile will be wireless in many places. Radio technology is advancing very quickly. There would be plenty of spectrum IFF (and it’s a big IFF) there were regulatory reform to allow use of whitespace and make much more spectrum open. As we (and our computers) spend more and more time connected, we’ll be more and more impatient with having to switch connectivity modes when we walk out the front door.

That would mean no communication wires, cables or fibers coming to most single family residences. That could also mean true competition in communication services just as cell phone service offers more choices, more competition, and more innovation than landline service does today. It’s hard to make a business case for duplicate networks to each house; much easier to make the case for competitive radios, even on the same towers.

Just a speculation.

The (un)Social Directory

I want to be in an (un)social directory. I want to be accessible to some people, want to be findable by most people, but want to keep complete control of who communicates with me by what method.

The (un)social directory is the inverse of the kind of directories we’ve been living with throughout our lives; that makes it hard to think about initially.

A traditional directory is a collection of information about other people which you own - your Outlook directory, your collection of business cards, a phonebook, the phonebook in your mobile phone. Each entry gives you one or more ways to reach those other people. The information is static. If it changes, you have to both know about the change and take the time to enter the change or the directory will be out of date.

When you give people information about yourself to put in their directories, you are implicitly granting them permission to access you with that information. Once someone knows your mobile number he knows it; you can’t revoke that. You can refuse to answer when you get a caller ID you aren’t interested in but you have to change the number to revoke the privilege of calling it. On the other hand, if you do make a change, you have to find a way to notify all the people whom you do want to be able to reach you that the information changed.

Prepare to invert.

You maintain one copy of your master contact information in the (un)social directory – all of the possible ways to contact you. Everyone else has a similar master contact page which is visible only to her. When two people meet and exchange (un)social contact info, what they are actually doing is exchanging permissions but NOT contact information. Permissions are always revocable. This needs an example.

We meet for the first time at a tradeshow. You decide that you want to allow me email access to you because you may want to buy what I’m selling. I want to allow you both email and phone access as well as IM because I’m very eager for you to buy what I have to sell. We both do something online or on our mobile phones (UI TBD) to grant each other these permissions. Note that we do NOT exchange actual email addresses, IM handles, or mobile numbers.

We now each have two entries in our personal directory. The contact entry I use to reach you has nothing but permissions in it and the address of your contact page (which I can’t see but can get connected to you through). The other entry is the permissions I granted you which are to a subset of the possible ways to reach me. I can enhance, change or revoke these at any time – like if you don’t buy anything but keep calling to tell me about your golf game.

If I change phone numbers or email addresses, it makes no difference to you because you didn’t know what they were in the first place. As long as the address of my contact page remains the same, you’ll be able to get to me. And vice versa.

When you want to call me, you click on my name (whatever name you gave me) and a connection is made through my contact page. There’s some smarts in the directory application so you get the best permitted connection given the media you want to use – real time voice in this case – and the media I’ve permitted you and am available through at the minute. Maybe you’d like to leave voice mail if you can’t get me in real time; maybe you want to IM or email me. You may want me to call you back and can give me temporary permission to do that (remember, you didn’t give me general permission to call). But, since you are leaving just a permission and not a call back number, you don’t have to worry that I’ll pester you forever just because you asked me to call once.

How we get to the nirvana of the (un)social directory is coming up. So is findability.

Posted on my professional interest in this at My New Gig.

Fellow FWD-er CEO Daniel Berninger has more to say about directories here.

Aswath of EnThinnai shares the vision but differs on the business path to implementation.

Japan’s Internet Access Satellite Is a Mistake

CNN reports that “Japan launched a rocket Saturday carrying a satellite that will test new technology that promises to deliver "super high-speed Internet" service to homes and businesses around the world… If the technology proves successful, subscribers with small dishes will connect to the Internet at speeds many times faster than what is now available over residential cable or DSL services… the Associated Press said the satellite would offer speeds of up to 1.2 gigabytes per second [nb. with a seventeen foot dish].”

Sounds good but it isn’t.

What neither the Associated Press nor CNN picked up is the altitude at which the satellite is intended to orbit, probably because they don’t understand why that’s important. Slashdot was a little more discerning, however: they picked up that it is intended to be geostationary (always appearing in the same spot in the sky so that antennae can be pointed at it). Physics (and the release from the Japanese AerospaceExploration Agency) tell us that a geostationary satellite must be 22, 000 miles above the earth. Other laws of physics say that radio signals are going to take more than a tenth of a second to get there and the same time to get back; the universe apparently doesn’t allow faster speeds.

Not only does that mean that these satellites won’t be good for interactive gaming (as Slashdot points out) and that they’ll be terrible for VoIP; they also won’t work well for web browsing. That matters! A modern web page is built in many interactions between your computer and the host of the website (much more detail here); the minimum time for each of those interactions is half a second because the signal has to go up and down to get to the server and up and down to get back to you. Those half a seconds don’t sound like much but they add up (this delay is called “latency”). If you use satellite, you know how slow page builds are and how may pages just break during the delay. Unfortunately fast data rates don’t help when latency is the problem.

The satellite’ll be good for email; it’s a good backup to oceanic fiber that seems to be getting cut lately. It will NOT do what the Japanese Agency’s press release says: “…even in some areas where major ground infrastructure for the Internet is difficult to establish, people can enjoy the same level of Internet service as that in urban areas.” Cable, DSL, and even terrestrial wireless measure latency in milliseconds (thousandths of a second); latency is very often MORE important than bandwidth in determining the quality of Internet experience. Anyone who thinks geostationary satellites are an acceptable way to bring broadband to rural areas doesn’t understand how the modern web works.

WiMAX vs. WiFi

In fact WiFi (technically standard 802.11) and WiMAX (802.16) don’t compete for broadband users or applications today. That’s partly because WiFi is widely deployed and WiMAX is still largely an unfulfilled promise and partly because the two protocols were designed for very different situations. However, if WiMAX is eventually widely deployed, there will be competition between them as last mile technologies.

Some people describe the difference between WiFi and WiMAX as analogous to the difference between a cordless phone and a mobile phone. Wifi, like a cordless phone, is primarily used to provide a connection within a limited area like a home or an office. WiMAX is used (or planned to be used) to provide broadband connectivity from some central location to most locations inside or outside within its service radius as well as to people passing through in cars. Just like mobile phone service, there are likely to be WiMAX dead spots within buildings.

From a techie POV, the analogy is apt at another level: WiFi, like cordless phones, operates in unlicensed spectrum (in fact cordless phones and WiFi can interfere with each other in the pitiful swatch of spectrum that’s been allocated to them). There are some implementations of WiMAX for unlicensed spectrum but most WiMAX development has been done on radios which operate on frequencies whose use requires a license.

Some more subversive types (they’re subversive so I can’t link to them) say that WiMAX is what you get when bellheads (not a nice term) try to reinvent WiFi the way they’d like it to be. It’s true that WiMAX is much more a command and control protocol than WiFi. Oversimplified, in a WiFi environment every device within reach of an access point shouts for attention whenever it’s got something to transmit. In that chaos, some signals tromp on other signals; the more powerful devices and those closer to the access point tend to get more than their share of airtime like the obnoxious kid who always has his hand up in the front of the class. In WiMAX devices contend for initial attention but then are assigned times when they may ask to speak. The protocol allows the operator more control over the quality of service provided – bellheads like control.

But it’s not clear that more control means better service than contentious chaos (I’m talking about technology but the same may apply to economies or bodies politic). The Internet and its routing algorithms are chaotic; the routers just throw away packets if they get to busy to handle them. Bellheads (and even smart people like Bob Metcalfe) were sure that design or lack thereof wouldn’t scale. They were wrong.

Same people said that voice would never work over the Internet – there’s no guarantee of quality, you see. They were wrong although it’s taken awhile to prove it. Now HD voice is available on the Internet but NOT on the traditional phone network (although it could be).

Lovers of an orderly environment and those who like to keep order were absolutely sure that WiFi couldn’t work once it became popular. Not only is it chaotic; it also operates in the uncontrolled environment of unlicensed frequencies along with cordless phones, bluetooth headsets, walkie-talkies and the occasional leaky microwave oven. But somehow it’s become near indispensable even in places where a city block full of access points contend for the scarce frequencies.

Net: I’m not convinced that WiMAX won’t suffer from its own orderliness. Did you ever fume leaving an event when an amateur cop (or a professional one) managed traffic into an endless snarl? Fact is cars at low speed usually merge better without help than otherwise. Turns out that control comes at the expense of wasted capacity. The reason that the Internet or WiFi radios can work is that the computing power necessary to deal with chaos from the edge of the network is far cheaper and less subject to disruption or misallocation than the computing power (and communication) for central command and control.

WiMAX may be too well-controlled for its own good. Moreover, if it is used only in regulated spectrum where most frequencies are idle most of the time AND licenses for the frequencies have to be purchased, it will be even less efficient than if it could contend for unlicensed spectrum.

By the way, WiFi CAN operate at distances as great as WiMAX but there are two reasons why it doesn’t. One reason is that radios operating in the unlicensed frequencies are not allowed to be as powerful as those operated with licenses; less power means less distance. These regulations are based on the dated assumption that devices can’t regulate themselves – but the assumption MAY be correct over great enough distances. The second reason why WiFi access points don’t serve as wide an area as WiMAX access points are planned to do is the engineering belief that the problem of everybody shouting at once, even if it’s surmountable in a classroom, would be catastrophic in a larger arena. Maybe.

New licensed spectrum is being made available for WiMAX and other technologies NOT including WiFi - for example, the valuable 700MHz frequencies currently used by analog over the air TV. WiMAX could have a good run because it is allowed to operate in that efficient spectrum while WiFi will eventually run out of the pitifully little spectrum that’s been allocated to it. That’s policy and politics and not engineering but could still be a reason for WiMAX success.

Why WiMAX? is about the advantages of that technology.

Internet 2.0 is Open Spectrum is an argument against licensed spectrum.

HD Voice

The bandwidth of the telephone connection between our homes and the telephone network hasn’t changed in my long lifetime. Although some noise has been eliminated in long distance calls (sometime and if we’re not on a cellphone), voices on the phone still sound like they did sixty-five years ago. We’ve trained ourselves to accept the clipped quality of a telephone voice with its lack of emotional overtones.

You wouldn’t dream of listening to music over the phone. You expect and get much better sound quality from almost any radio and on TV. Movies have Dolby sound. But the telephone is still the telephone.

Guess what? It doesn’t have to be this way. The answer to telephone voice is voice over IP (VoIP) – so long as both parties are NOT on the public switched telephone network.

In the early days of VoIP, we had to save scarce bandwidth and contend with uncertain Internet delivery so we compressed voice even further than the phone network does and made quality even worse. But, today, bandwidth is relatively plentiful and cheap processing power usually lets us overcome any short delivery glitches (technically called jitter). Now high definition voice is not only possible but it’s also being delivered.

My friend Daniel Berninger’s been telling me this for a long time. As CEO of FWD International (in which I’m an investor), he’s insisted that all our new voice applications (like Facebook VoiceMail) be high definition. But, since I have a tin ear and had a cheap set of earphones, I didn’t realize how important high definition voice is.

Yesterday I had a phone call to make to someone in Israel. I tried to place the call on my Vonage phone (cheap rate to Israel). Since Vonage is designed to interface with the traditional phone network and since I was calling an ordinary phone, I would have gotten the usual phone quality if I’d connected. But Vonage said it had no circuits available. I knew the Skype ID of the person I wanted to contact so I put on my brand new headset and called that ID through my computer.

Fortunately the person I was calling is an active Skype user and he was on his computer and saw and answered my Skype call. He apparently had a decent quality headset as well. Skype devotes extra bandwidth – you’re paying for it, not them – to making call quality good when the call is between two Skype users. The quality was not only good – it was superb. Usually when I speak to someone for whom English is not his native language, there is a lot of “what” and “please say that again” and “I didn’t quite understand you” in both directions. None of that. We were on Skype an hour and sound quality made the conversation much better than a phone conversation has ever been.

I used to think the reason I have a hard time understanding people on the phone is because I can’t see their lips and their expressions. Now I realize much of the problem is the terrible audio quality – which we’re so accustomed to – of a traditional phone call.

As more and more of our communication goes over abundant Internet bandwidth and bypasses the telephony last mile and as the handset and headset manufacturers have an incentive to spend a little extra on speakers and microphones to support HD voice, we’re going to start insisting on getting what we’ve been missing. Ironically, voice over IP over a DSL connection over your old copper wires to the phone company (assuming those copper wires support DSL) can be and soon will be better than traditional telephone voice.

Is any more example needed of lack of innovation on the traditional phone network?

BTW, what did I pay for this hour long Skype call to Israel given that I already have a computer and an Internet connection? Nada! Zilch! Skype-to-Skype calls are free anywhere in the world. That’s just money, though; HD voice is priceless.

Should a Cellular Carrier Be Your ISP at Home?

It’s not cheap; it’s not available everywhere; it’s not even particularly fast. But wireless Internet access from your cellular provider may be your best option for home Internet access in some parts of the US (I don’t know enough about 3G coverage outside the US to write intelligently about it). Moreover, if it works for you, it’ll probably work all over your house, in the yard, and in an increasing number of places you visit. And no installation is required.

If you already have cable-based broadband, you would only be interested in cellular coverage for roaming so you can skip to the next post. Similarly, if you have a good fixed fixed wireless connection giving you over a meg of download capacity most of the time, you’re not interested. If you’re satisfied with your DSL, even if it’s just basic DSL, you’ll probably want to stick with it because it’ll be lot cheaper than wireless from a mobile carrier.

But if dialup and satellite have been your only options, read on.

In response to my post Why Satellite Internet Access Sucks, reader Michael Hardt posted this comment:

“I'm in rural New Hampshire, and I'm always scheming to improve on my dial-up Internet. Lately I've been reading about HSDPA and EVDO. I have very spotty cell phone access where I live--generally to make a call I have to walk outside and step about thirty feet away from the house. I've heard of cell phone repeaters and amplifiers and stationary antennae but don't understand them. Is there some way that I can mount an antenna to my roof to get Internet via a cell signal? Can I find out whether HSDPA and EVDO are even available in Canaan, NH?”

Bad news is that apparently neither HSPDA (High Speed Packet Downlink Access) nor EVDO (Evolution Data Optimized) are available yet in Canaan, NH. The better news is that they may be soon. The rest of this post is about what these technologies can provide, how to tell whether or not you can get them where you live, and some facts to help you decide whether these are good alternatives for your home broadband service.

Oversimplified, HSPDA is used on GSM networks like that run by AT&T and Unicel; EVDO is used on GSM networks like those of Verizon and Sprint. If you use a different carrier, you need to check with them to see what sort of data plan they provide and find out what the coverage area for it is.

I use Verizon Wireless EVDO for roaming (although only for backup as a home service) so I know the most about that. You use it by buying (for less than $100 from Verizon Wireless) a datacard or USB device for your PC. You install some software; and, if you have coverage, you’re online. The rub is that an “unlimited” data plan costs $60/month, requires a two-year signup, and is even more if you don’t already have Verizon Wireless service.

“True” EVDO gives me download speeds at or a little above one megabit/second most of the time. Verizon advertises upload speeds of 500-800Kbps (kilobits per second) but I rarely get better than 200 to 300 and sometimes less. Latency (the time it takes for packets to get from your computer to websites and back) is typically low. This means that you can use EVDO for web browsing happily and can use VoIP over EVDO.

Be careful about downloading video and other big stuff, though. The Verizon plan says “If usage exceeds 5 GB per line during any billing period, we reserve the right to reduce throughput speeds of any application that would otherwise exceed such speed to a maximum of approximately 200 Kbps. These speeds are subject to change, in our reasonable discretion, in order to address network issues.” I’ve occasionally exceeded that with an online backup but no reason to assume they don’t mean to enforce this. They specifically ban P2P file sharing on this plan. I believe the restrictions of other carriers are at least as draconian but haven’t examined them.

Verizon’s data network does NOT provide EVDO everywhere. In many locations only 1xRTT is available. This service (which is part of the same rate plan) is a lot slower. It can go up to 110Kbps in either direction but Verizon says not to plan on more than 60Kbps (I agree). This is about twice as fast on the downlink side (from the Web to you) as most dialup connections and at least four times as fast for uplink. It’s fine for most email; slow for downloads; painful but better than dialup for web browsing; and barely usable sometimes for VoIP services like Skype. Although the download is nominally a lot slower than satellite, I found 1xRTT about equal to satellite in total experience because it has low latency (satellite latency is high) and is weather resistant.

Verizon Wireless is rapidly upgrading their network from 1xRTT to EVDO. They never install a new location or even a new radio without putting in EVDO. In Vermont the EVDO coverage area has grown like a welcome ink blot from its initial appearance in downtown Burlington a little over a year ago. Chance are, if you have good Verizon cell phone coverage, you’ll have EVDO reasonably soon – but they’re not making any promises.

So how do you find out what service is available to you? How do I know that reader Michael can’t get EVDO in Canaan right now? Two ways to find out. One is pretty simple, if you don’t have good cellular service for voice, you’re not going to be able to get it for data. Comes off the same towers. If a particular carrier doesn’t offer voice service in your area, they don’t offer data service either.

But, if you or a friend gets decent voice coverage from a mobile carrier at your house, you may be able to get good data coverage as well. The interactive Verizon coverage map is at http://www.verizonwireless.com/b2c/CoverageLocatorController?requesttype=NEWREQUEST (be sure to specify that you want to see data coverage). They call EVDO “BroadbandAccess” on this map and call 1xRTT either “Enhanced Service” or “National Access”; ignore “extended enhanced services” because it includes roaming rates.

A similar map for Sprint is at http://coverage.sprintpcs.com/IMPACT.jsp?id16=evdo_coverage&covType=sprint. Note that Sprint advertises that both their EVDO and 1xRTT are a little slower than Verizon. I haven’t tested this.

The AT&T map is at http://www.wireless.att.com/coverageviewer/. They advertise that their HSPDA provides 400-700Kbps downlink and 384 Kbps uplink. Like Verizon and Sprint much of the rural portion of AT&T’s data coverage uses a lower speed technology – there is called EDGE and runs at about the same speed as 1xRTT.

I couldn’t find a map for Unicel which is a shame because they have good rural coverage. But they’re in the process of being bought by Verizon Wireless and spinning off their some of their GSM properties to AT&T.

Cellular data isn’t the affordable fast service for everyone that we need to have in Vermont and the rest of the nation. But, where it’s available, it’s a better solution than satellite or dialup for those who can afford it.

See Sharing Cellular Data Access Between Multiple PCs if you want to connect your whole home network through a cellular data connection on one computer.

Impressions of Tel Aviv

Tel Aviv is an excited beach-front city, quite secular with few people in either Jewish or Muslim religious garb. This is a high-tech city, home of Silicon Wadi, a late night city, a city with a building boom and the construction cranes of progress perched on the fairly low skyline. Late model cars jam into rush hour traffic – annoying but not as bad as many major cities.

There are solar panels for hot water on top of some of the houses; I thought I’d see more. No sign of photovoltaic or windmills. The country is a leader in geothermal energy. This part of the Middle East isn’t where the oil is.

Yesterday the beach was sunny and there was hardly enough wind for the wind surfers and lasers playing in the waves. The beach population in Speedos was surprisingly old and in surprisingly good shape. Today it’s obvious, even without weather.com, that there’s a storm offshore. The waves are over-topping the breakwater and washing most of the beach. Rain showers are blown onshore between breaks of sunlight and the palm fronds are blowing chaotically. Only a few intrepid windsurfers are out and they’re getting the wild rides they’re looking for.

It’s a new city; it was desert when a few Jewish families bought the land from Bedouin tribes in 1908 and settled here on the eastern shore of the Mediterranean. Security then was a problem since the rule law-and-order of the Ottoman Empire, which then ruled this area, extended only to the cities. So, for history, go to ancient and always-troubled Jerusalem (ironically the name means God’s peace). I won’t get there this trip.

Some people think it’s dangerous to come to Israel. That’s  not the case; the life expectancy here is slightly greater than in the US despite compulsory military service, frequent battles close to home, rockets from Gaza, and terrorism (statistically insignificant as a cause of death as horrifying as it is).

Extra security against terrorism is evident even before you leave the States; you get rescreened and your carry-ons rechecked in a special boarding area at Newark before boarding a Continental or El Al flight bound for Israel. The gates for these flights always seem to be at the end of the airport concourse, perhaps so the planes can be guarded more easily.

Guards at the doors to hotels have not only wands for weapon detection but serviceable pistols; taxi trunks are checked driving up to hotels. There’s an armed guard at night at the beach entrance to the hotel. But the streets are friendly and safe, street crime much less an issue than in many cities this size. Streets are rarely deserted, even late at night.

Young people here as likely to have met their friends in the military as at school or in college. The VoIP technology that first brought me to Israel ten years ago was an outgrowth of work in the Israeli tank corps (tanks fight in a tough communications environment and need to communicate to coordinate attacks and avoid destroying their friends). Alumni of that first wave of telecommunications technology, many from VoIP pioneer VocalTec, are now mainly in management positions. A younger cohort of programmers are likely to contribute greatly to the services that I believe will leave traditional phone service and email far behind during the next decade. That’s why we’re here recruiting.

You don’t come here to find cheap programming. If you have a complete spec (or a boring project), it’s far cheaper to outsource to Ukraine or India. Even Israeli companies do that. You get hard work and energy here but you get that in cheaper places as well. It’s worth doing R&D in Israel when the R component is as big as the D, when you expect your developers to participate heavily in product definition and design, when you need to benefit from having your R&D plugged into a place where lots of parallel (and of course some competing) development is being done.

One obstacle to finding the developers you want for your team is so many talented young people quickly cluster in twos or threes to begin their own startups. They’re hiring themselves! Israel is second only to the US in the number of startups despite its population of just over 7 million (less than NYC). There are more NASDAQ listed companies based here than anywhere else outside of North America. (stats from wikipedia).

Security gets ugly again on the way out. You really do have to be at the airport 2-3 hours before your flight.

Jeff Pulver posts here about recruiting in Tel Aviv.

FWD International En Route to Tel Aviv

FWD International Chairman Jeff Pulver, CEO Dan Berninger and I are en route to Tel Aviv where we’ll be looking for great developers to add to our team and helping acquaint the Israeli developer community with our planned APIs and what they’ll enable. I’m sure we’ll also get a lot of feedback on what we should be doing and how we should do it as well.

It’s likely that much (but not all) of the R&D for FWD International - which is so far funded by Jeff, Yossi Vardi, and me - will take place in Israel building on skills and technologies well-established there. We need great UI skills, skill and experience with embedded apps (as in Facebook), wizards of distributed backend processing. Lots of flash experience never hurt, either; and SIP or other VoIP experience, preferably at the UDP level, would be helpful. If you have a few of these skills and want to see us in Tel Aviv this week, Jeff’s made himself the contact.

Note: appropriate to my role as acting CTO, I’m taking a nerdish view of the skills required. Jeff’s user-oriented view is here.

Verizon OPEN Wireless

Very surprising and welcome announcement from Verizon Wireless yesterday:

“Verizon Wireless today announced that it will provide customers the option to use, on its nationwide wireless network, wireless devices, software and applications not offered by the company. Verizon Wireless plans to have this new choice available to customers throughout the country by the end of 2008…

“ ‘This is a transformation point in the 20-year history of mass market wireless devices – one which we believe will set the table for the next level of innovation and growth,’ said Lowell McAdam, Verizon Wireless president and chief executive officer.”

Lowell’s right. And Verizon Wireless is right to open up. There’s plenty of room to be cynical about this; after all, Verizon Wireless is trying to STOP the FCC from putting an openness requirement on the 700Mhz spectrum to be auctioned. Very well-informed Om Malik posts: “Do we really believe that Verizon is going to be happy being Pipes-R-Us?” He point out many ways this there may be less to this announcement than meets the eye.

As an optimist, I think Verizon’s acting in enlightened self-interest which is just great. Here are some of the factors which may have influenced their decision:

1. They DO have the best network coverage in the US – especially for data coverage. Best way to capitalize on that is to have developers build appliances and apps which run on their service.
2. Because they are CDMA (a protocol NOT used in most of the rest of the world), they run the risk that no new stuff will be developed for their network, especially if it remains a walled garden. The US is a big market but the rest of the world is even bigger.
3. The next time somebody develops an iPhone-like breakthrough – and somebody will – they want it run on their network, not be locked to AT&T.
4. Amazon’s Kindle, which could but doesn’t run on Verizon’s network, is a clear example of how usage may be sold bundled with a device. They’re not going to be a better bookstore than Amazon. They need these innovations to be on their network.
5. They know that the next year or so will bring huge device innovation including (I think) wireless connectivity in almost every GPS and associated services. They know that their network and their data service – EVDO – which can do handoffs at 80mph is well positioned to benefit greatly from this
6. As voice minutes turn to VoIP minutes and WiFi minutes, they’re better off keeping some of that traffic onnet even as simple bits rather than losing it all. Note that, to their credit, they DID change their terms of service to allow VoIP over their data service.
7. The FCC has said that the huge chunks of 700Mhz spectrum going up for auction have to be used “openly” by the winner. It would be hard for Verizon to operate a network which is half open and half closed. Maybe they DO want that spectrum, don’t think they can change the rules, and want to be ready for it.

If you’re torn between my optimism and Om’s pessimism, Galeal Zino suggests a test:

“Let's see which comes first:

“1. Articles about the millions of dollars of deep packet inspection and payload-based billing systems that Verizon is going to incorporate in order to "manage" their soon to be "open" network.

“2. Articles about third-party mobile devices that interop with Verizon's network, using CDMA for voice when necessary, and using unrestricted IP to place VoIP calls using third-party solutions when more appropriate.” 

Readers’ Blogs

As a blogger, I have a smart group of readers. Not only do they post intelligent comments that correct or expand on what I blog; many of them also have blogs of their own. It’s particularly fun when a conversation seems to go back and forth between our blogs.

Aswath is a frequent commenter, especially on things having to do with telephony which he knows better than almost anyone else. He’s invented a clever service called EnThinnai which is a step forward in online communication; I saw it at VON and was impressed. Aswath posted comparing EnThinnai to the FWD design principles I posted about. I’m flattered to say that his service (independently) makes many of the same assumptions about how communications applications should and shouldn’t be designed. We disagree – as we long have – on the continued relevancy of the Public Switched Telephone Network (PSTN). Aswath knows that the PSTN could be made to do much more than it does; I know that it is unlikely to happen given the ownership of that network. I do have to admit there are a few people still using it.

David Usher is a fellow Vermonter. He recently posted about energy reality here in Vermont. We get two-thirds of our power from Vermont Yankee (nuclear) and very large scale Quebec Hydro. Both of these deals are up for renewal in the next couple of years. Both will cost us more. Both are reliable and clean sources of energy; we can’t replace either of them with anything except even more expensive fossil fuel in the short or the medium term. So we need to renew the deals. David says all this and I agree.

He writes: “…It's unrealistic to think that wind, solar, small hydro, wood, cows or any other Vermont-based source of electricity can add significantly to our supply. For the moment, these are merely 'feel-good', but unrealistic choices; helpful, perhaps in 2050, but inconsequential in 2015.”

O