Dadamotive: Hyperconnectivity: December 2008 Archives

Catching up

Posted by Herman | December 31 | 2008 11:42 AM | permalink

Vernor Vinge is a writer annex professor in mathematics and physics. One of his last books " Rainbows End" explores a near-future scenario with an interesting twist.

What if Alzheimer could be cured? Some elderly patients would regain their full mental capabilities after maybe 10 or 20 years of being disconnected. They would have to be reintegrated in a hyperconnected world where you cannot function as a citizen without using the tools. Vinge postulates some technological advancements which are close to the current state: high bandwidth wireless connections everywhere, wearable computers, contact lenses that can superimpose images on what you see. This would allow for instance children to superimpose their fantasy game environment (i.e.World of Warcraft) upon reality. Teaching would change to immersing the class in a collective superimposed environment.

And chatting? Still there ;-)

As for curing Alzheimer? Some recent developments give a lot of hope.

" A slow, chronic starvation of the brain as we age appears to be one of the major triggers of a biochemical process that causes some forms of Alzheimer's disease."

Ultralight

Posted by Herman | December 29 | 2008 12:06 PM | permalink

2008 is the year marking the fact that more laptops were sold than desktop PC's.

Combining low weight, a bright screen, high performance and a long batterylife is the ultimate goal for any laptop producer. This has spurred a continuous flow of improvements with impressive results: the latest Apple Macbook uses something like 9 Watt, and there is still some more room to reduce the power requirements according to GigaOm.

mere 9 watts....... it will only be a matter of time before solar cells will be integrated in the casing of the laptop, extending the battery life to unprecedented lenghts.

Given the potential of E-ink or OLED based screens that are well readable in bright light while using very little power on might envision a future where we carry selfsustaining netbooks with us. Through wireless connections we communicate with the infrastructure: "computing clouds" that do the heavy computing stuff and secure storage.

Easier, flexible and efficient use of energy.

Santa Phone

Posted by Herman | December 22 | 2008 11:36 PM | permalink

For free on your Iphone, for kids who believe in Santa Claus.

The Iphone Santa Claus tracker shows you where the sled is.

Cute.

No more hiding

Posted by Herman | December 19 | 2008 7:27 AM | permalink

The implications of mobile phones with camera's is far greater than one would expect. The ability to shoot a photo or small video at any moment combined with the hyperconnectivity of the Internet creates video's like this one. Watch the policeman knocking over a cyclist.

The policeman later said the cyclist was obstructing traffic and deliberately steered his bicycle into an officer. A video of the body-check was posted on YouTube and has been viewed more than 1.6 million times. The policeman has been degraded as a consequence.

Fiber 101

Posted by Herman | December 18 | 2008 6:17 PM | permalink

For most people the fierce debates and battles about fiber-to-the-home (FttH) will have been invisible or boring. Only specialized webzines and bloggers or a good journalist have understood what has been going on.

This will most likely change in the near future: FttH will be something we will be getting used to. So what is the reason there is so much fuss about fiber? This post is the beginning of a small series trying to give you some background on a thin wire with a very disruptive power. So lets start with the basics.

Telecommunication means "communicating over a distance", sending signals back and forth.

You can send signals through the air (sound, radio) or through a guide (wire). The nice thing about sending signals through the air is that everybody can pick them up at the same time, which is at the same time its major drawback. The nice thing about a wire is that it guides and confines the signals, but you have to have a wire first. Lets focus on signals over wires.

Signals tend to weaken with distance until they are unreadable. Usually high frequency signals weaken quicker than low frequency signals. Like if you walk to an open air popconcert: you here the bass notes from very far away, the high notes only when you are close. So if we have a wire travelling a certain distance there is a maximum signal frequency you can send over the wire before it becomes too weak to read at the other end. The longer the wire the lower the maximum frequency.

The amount of information you can send over the wire (per second) is limited by the maximum signal frequency,

Now we have a key indicator of the quality of a wire for telecommunication: the best wire lets high frequencies travel far without weakening.

Fact is that the copper wires used for telephone networks are quite bad at this. The coax cable as used for cable-TV networks is already quite an improvement. Glass fiber is more than a million times better. Thats why 98 % of all the (globespanning and local) networks are built from fiber....except the last part to your home.

Betting the future

Posted by Herman | December 18 | 2008 8:06 AM | permalink

Did anyone ever wonder how Youtube makes money?

We all watch the videos available on their site, embed them in our posts, send the links to our friends. Allthough they do not have to pay for the content in videos that are uploaded by us, Youtube has to pay for bandwidth.

How does this work? Anyone can buy space in a datacentre for storage and servers. The next thing you need is the connection to the Internet so users like us can reach the storage through a hyperlink and request the file to be sent or streamed to us. The network owners charge money for this bandwidth to Youtube. The more videos that are watched, the higher the bill sent to Youtube.

Our subscription fee for Internet access (DSL, Cable, Fiber, wireless) does NOT cover these costs.

Youtube uses all tricks known to man to reduce these costs, but our favorite industry experts at Telco 2.0 estimate Youtube's bandwidth bill at a staggering USD 1 milllion per day (!). The income generated by ads does not cover this bill at all, yet. (The bandwidth costs are by far the dominant costs in their business model).

Must be an interesting challenge to get to breakeven.

Imagine if Youtube would start streaming HD video instead of small highly compressed video's: their bandwidth costs would increase 10-20 fold to USD 10-20 mio per day.

The indepth analysis of Telco 2.0 provides you with the details, showing the big gap between the concepts of TV-over-Internet and the business model behind it.

We need a big change in the business model to get to a sustainable business.

Simply happy!

Posted by Willem | December 10 | 2008 9:35 AM | permalink

Yesterday my son persuaded me to buy the Ocarina application for my iphone. It turned out to be one of the best spent seventy-nine cents ever. Ocarina is an application developed by Smule, a company created by some Stanford people. The concept is simple: turn your iphone into a flute. Or Ocarina, an ancient flute-like wind instrument, according to Wikipedia. You can then play this flute by blowing into the microphone of your iphone and tapping four 'holes' on your touch screen. Now this is nice. But was is really great is the fact that the Ocarina is a social application. Tap on the globe icon and you will see and hear other Ocarina players throughout the world. The globe view will highlight the source of the music. Name your Ocarina if you want listeners around the world to identify your performances. The globe is shown as a night-globe with light spots where people played the Ocarina. If you tap on a spot, you hear ocarina music that was played by someone in this place. So i listened to music from Japan, Florida, Brazil and Australia in 3 minutes. And became very happy from the fact that in all these places people spent time on this totally useless, but highly entertaining application and shared it. This concept was previously exploited by the same people in an even more silly lighter application, which consist of a lighter on your iphone screen. And that on produces bright spots on the globe the more virtual kilojoules were burnt in a specific city. Read about this one here.

Follow me

Posted by Herman | December 08 | 2008 7:27 PM | permalink

We rely upon a lot of sophisticated technology in our daily life. Unfortunately a lot of people (and politicians) do not understand the background and limitations of the systems we rely on. Or even worse, take pride in the fact that they do not understand technology. Not very smart, as a recent example shows.

People assume that navigation systems (satnav) like Garmin, TomTom, Route66 and others work identical. After all, the road is the same and the satellites are the same. Wrong.

There have been some serious accidents with motorcyclists touring in the countryside and crashing into each other because the satnav systems gave different instructions. One said "go straight", the other said "go left". Differences in software, hardware, or which satellites are being used can lead to different directions. Currently motorcyclists who use satnav in touring clubs are instructed to drive behind each other to prevent these kind of accidents.

First Casualty

Posted by Herman | December 06 | 2008 10:20 PM | permalink

"The first casualty in war is the truth".

If we reverse the causality we can conclude that telecom and broadband are a warzone. Apparently there is such much at stake that there is enough money and energy available to spin a series of half-truths, near-lies, rigged statistics and outright propaganda in the press. This week we could witness at least 2 good examples.

In the USA Scott Cleland has created a big row by claiming in The Register and his blog that Google is reponsible for 20 % of the Internet traffic and should therefore pay for 20 % of the cost of Internet. A false but fiendishly clever argument. Why is it false?

All the internet traffic is generated by people like us making the choice to request a reponse from Googles/Youtubes servers. We pay already for the transportation costs through our broadband subscriptions. Google pays for the servers and the bandwidth from its servers to the net. So Mr Cleland is fundamentally wrong. But for telco's the idea of billing both Google and customers by the "tick" sounds great. Proponents of "Net Neutrality" argue that this would kill the Internet as we know it and destroy a lot of the value for society. Mr Cleland writes for a socalled "astroturf" organization, organized lobbying posing as a spontaneous "grassroots" movement.

In the Netherlands Telecompaper has released a review together with Iping of developments in broadband speeds. The article states that cable outperforms DSL. Close reading of the report and reviewing testresults produced by a fiber user in Amsterdam running the Iping testtool Nuria produce quite a different picture. Telecompaper and Iping look only at maximum downloadspeeds and rate connections on the ratio between maximum speed and measured average speed. The independent testresults show that fiber connections outperform everything else by far, but most spectacularly in uploadspeeds and latency (gaming). DSL performs great and at least as good as cable when surfing responses and gaming are considered.

So they have taken an approach where fiber (the biggest threat to cable) is ignored. The rating is chosen in such a way that it makes cable look good against DSL.

Beware: the first casualty in discussions over broadband is the truth.

Mainport

Posted by Herman | December 05 | 2008 6:28 AM | permalink

TeleGeography has created interesting graphs showing how the flow of data over the Internet between countries and continents has grown (CAGR 57 %) and shifted over time.

The Netherlands was and is by far one of the major hubs for connectivity. The amount of capacity connected to the Netherlands is 2.1 TBps (15 %). The ratio between datavolumes and number of inhabitants is far higher than other countries, showing it to be a supernode with a very important role in the Internet (see Linked).

Om Malik has the most pointed view. The density of shipping routes once was a direct indicator of the trade volumes. Nowadays information is the indicator of trade. These charts clearly show the shift from a very dominant USA to a different order. Like the fact the African countries view the EU as their dominant hub.

So we have 3 mainports in the Netherlands. Rotterdam, Schiphol and the AMSIX. I wish our politicians would have as much attention for the new source of wealth as for the old ones.

Hyperconnected

Posted by Herman | December 03 | 2008 6:16 PM | permalink

Here is what connectivity can do for you. Over 105 million views in 2 years, probably one of the second best viewed Youtube clip ever.

Witch hunt

Posted by Herman | December 03 | 2008 9:22 AM | permalink

A lot of lobby-power is aimed at getting all kinds of laws passed in the EU which will make filesharing a crime which surpassed child pornography or calls for terrorism.

In the USA we can see the effects of these kinds of laws. The RIAA (Recording Industry Association) is throwing an enormous amount of lawsuits and expensive lawyers at all kinds of individuals as a scare tactic. Fortunately some people fight back, now with the help of a Harvard Law professor and his students. (For those interested BoingBoing has a good podcast of an interview.). Their case is summarized in the following excerpt of their counterclaim. Something to remind our lawmakers of....

This law gives the RIAA unbridled discretion to sue millions of individuals and to threaten expensive time-consuming process and a bankrupting verdict against anyone with the effrontery and stamina to resist.

Delegation of such power to private persons represents "legislative delegation in its most obnoxious form."

Imagine a statute which, in the name of deterrence, provides for a $750 fine for each mile-per-hour that a driver exceeds the speed limit, with the fine escalating to $150,000 per mile over the limit if the driver knew he or she was speeding. Imagine that the fines are not publicized, and most drivers do not know they exist. Imagine that enforcement of the fines is put in the hands of a private, self-interested police force, that has no political accountability, that can pursue any defendant it chooses at its own whim, that can accept or reject payoffs in exchange for not prosecuting the tickets, and that pockets for itself all payoffs and fines.

Imagine that a significant percentage of these fines were never contested, regardless of whether they had merit, because the individuals being fined have limited financial resources and little idea of whether they can prevail in front of an objective judicial body.

Meltdown

Posted by Herman | December 02 | 2008 7:11 PM | permalink

If exaflood horrorstories are not enough you can always try to blame filesharing technology directly. GigaOm has an excellent analysis of a scare story on the usage of the UDP-protocol instead of the TCP-protocol for BitTorrent file transfers. (UDP is a basic mechanism for sending packets without explicitly asking for an acknowledge of reception, TCP asks explicitly for an ACK(nowledge) for each package sent.) Using UDP would crowd out all VOIP according to the scare story. False! according to GigaOm.

So why did Bennett (the author of the scare story) chose to ignore all of this? Because a little scaremongering can go a long way to make the case for an ISP-based network management clampdown on P2P traffic. The only way to prevent the coming Internet meltdown, he contends, is to filter out uTorrent's UDP transfers on the ISP level, and the only way to get this done is do away with net neutrality. Right -- because if there's one thing that we've learned from the financial sector, it's that meltdowns are best prevented by doing away with regulation.

Exaflood

Posted by Herman | December 02 | 2008 6:36 PM | permalink

Every now and then a story is printed claiming that the Internet is clogging up. Usually filesharing is named as the culprit, implying in the same breath that all filesharing is criminal and those terrible illegal filesharers are stealing capacity from law-abiding citizens. Therefore unfortunately a limit must be imposed upon the total amount of data one can transport in a month and/or the ISP has to check for filesharing and block or limit it.

These stories are bogus. There is no clogging as the University of Minnesota and the renowned prof. Andrew Odlyzko has shown. Ars Technica has a fine summary of the results of the study, showing a drop in utilization because bandwidth grows faster than usage.

The real reason behind the stories is money. Big Content wants to sustain its old business model based on strict limits how to get access to content. Big ISP and telco's want to increase their ARPU, unfortunately by making capacity scarce instead of delivering more value.

As Ars put it eloquently :

"exaflood" horror stories should never be used in an attempt to justify a nonneutral 'Net on the grounds that the "tech simply can't handle it." The tech can handle it just fine; the question is whether companies are willing to handle the tech."