Dadamotive: Hyperconnectivity: February 2009 Archives

Counterproductive

Posted by Herman | February 26 | 2009 2:45 PM | permalink

The purpose of patents is to create a balance. A balance between the need to create a sizable reward and incentive for inventors and investors, and the need to benefit as society from these innovations. More importantly, to create a continuous flow of improvements and innovations building upon each other. That is the motivation to limit patent protection in time. After some years the inventor is deemed to be rewarded and others can use the ideas to create something new.

The current patent system has been designed for physical goods and processes, not for a hyperconnected age where "connect and share" of ideas creates the highest value for society. The abundance of rather ridiculous software patents creates stalemates and patent wars that serve no purpose.

The latest one is reported by Ars Tecnica. As a proof that trouble never comes alone, poor TomTom is targeted by Microsoft in a broad patent lawsuit. The details are available in the article, but the general issue at hand is a proof that software patents currently lead to World War I -like warfare. Old ideas, stalemates and a massive loss to society.

Change

Posted by Herman | February 22 | 2009 10:00 AM | permalink

Although the ranks of specialists are still dominated by middle aged men (babyboomers and the generation just after them) this will change soon. The student population at the universities has changed dramatically. More than 70 % of the students of medicine currently are female.

As one professor told me, the girls are usually the best students. Highly motivated, structured and very intelligent.

Most of them are not willing to work 80 hrs per week as an independent. They prefer to get a laborcontract with normal hours and vacations. This will mean the end of the current structure with "independent" specialists.

The second change has been triggered by the Iphone.

Its intuitive user-interface is very appealing to people in the medical profession. Already several applications are available for daily use, like a stored database of farmaceutical knowledge: drugs, their components, specific effects and side-effects, their application and so on. I am told that many specialists and specialized nurses carry an Iphone with them all the time just for this purpose: immediate, on the spot searches in this immense database.

From males with stethoscopes to females with Iphones.....

Test case

Posted by Herman | February 21 | 2009 8:55 AM | permalink

We are witnessing a large real life test. Thanks to a screwup of a record company the new album of U2 is all over the P2P networks. It will be interesting to see the impact.

First on the sale of the new CD which is important for record company, but secondly the impact on the revenue of the band, which is the metric for the musicians. The two are not necessarily correlated.

My prediction? A slightly lower sales figure for the record company, a higher income for the musicans due to higher prices and fully packed stadiums when they make a tour.

Access to (digital) music anywhere increases the value of the live experience.

It will be interesting to follow this particular case.

Wifi war

Posted by Herman | February 18 | 2009 4:45 PM | permalink

The magic of mobile communications hides the fact that the technology and the engineering supporting the magic have their limitations. (For anybody who is interested and wants to be awed by the intricacies of radio communications engineering, see digital wave propagation.HTM).

A friend of mine has a wonderful apartment in Amsterdam with a fiber connection , 100/100 Mbps. He has bought a toplevel wifirouter, N-spec, supporting up to 300 Mbps, to get full bandwidth to his laptops. To his frustration nothing works. The radio signal as seen by the laptops is fine, but no Internet whatsoever.

A befriended radio engineer explained what is the problem. All neighbours in the apartment block have wifi, some more than one access point. Hardly anybody bothers to change anything after the router is unpacked, other than the security settings. The standard setting is channel number 6, out of 13/14 channels available. All these access points are competing with each other on the same channel, creating a lousy signal-to-noise ratio.

The problem gets worse when you use N-spec routers: they need a lot more radiobandwidth and are more sensitive for interference.

So the solution is to choose a free channel (preferable number 1 [update: if you have an iPhone you better choose channel 1] or 14) or allocate channels between neighbours so as to minimize interference.

More likely people will start a war by purchasing antennas that amplify the signal strenght. That explains why range extenders and amplifying antennas are so popular in a crowded city like Amsterdam.

3 x 7.000.000.000

Posted by Herman | February 18 | 2009 9:46 AM | permalink

Now that the bad news about the sudden recession is all out in the open a lot of plans are put forward to stimulate the economy.

Obama has signed off a stimulus package including approx. 7 billion euros to improve the broadband networks in the USA, especially in rural areas.

Our Dutch unions propose plans requiring 7 billion euros to be spent on infrastructure, energy saving and the lot.

And to my utter surprise: nobody, absolutely nobody in the Netherlands mentions or encourages the 7 billion euros to be injected into the economy by private means.

The upgrade of our communication infrastructure to fiber (Fiber-to-the-Home) has been started by municipalities and entrepeneurs. The regulators (NMa, OPTA) have set the stage for a massive roll-out by Reggefiber (partly owned by KPN) in a manner which is quite unique and an example for other countries. Providing all of the Netherlands with fiber will require some 7 billion euros just for the physical wires. The rest comes on top.

Rolling out fiber-to-the-home is 80 % labour and 20 % materials. Most of the labour has to be local, and the Netherlands is home to several leading manfucaturers of fiber. There is a lot of proof that an improved communication infrastructure has significant multiplier effects in the rest of the economy.

And all this without spending tax-payers money.

Are there losers in this plan? Yes, the cable companies.

But if you look closely you will find that most of the cash generated by these companies is sent out of the country, sometimes even with some extra cash from the tax-authorities (loss compensation). And they have a history of milking the company, not of investing in our economy.

So why is no politician or talkshow proud of this fact?

Simple math

Posted by Herman | February 18 | 2009 9:10 AM | permalink

This week there is a worldwide conference in Barcelona on mobile communication.

A visitor reports that one of the messages of the conference is " Mobile broadband is the only serious alternative to bring broadband to the people - forget about Fiber to the Home/Curb etc.".

The last message shows how often lobbyists speculate on the fact that most people and especially politicians do not understand the laws of physics.

Debunking is easy: the message might be usefull for sparsely populated rural areas, but more than half of the worlds population lives in cities.

Do the math yourself.

- all bandwidth provided by an antenna is shared by everybody within the area its covers

- all the wireless data sent to and from the antenna must be transported to the Internet to be of any use (backhaul)

- this transport must be done with a fixed line (fiber) given the amount of data and the distances to be covered

So in Amsterdam we once did the math with some politicians.

- suppose you have an antenna which supports 100/100 Mbps, shared

- suppose you share this with 5 families (radio engineers will start to laugh because it is hardly feasible to create this, but lets assume it just for the sake of argument)

- than you need 85.000 antenna's + 85.000 fiber backhaul connections

- for which you have to pass every house and open every street, so why not go all the way fiber?

- suppose you share with 25 families? It reduces the number of backhaul fibers

- at that point you start to dilute the capacity significantly, which translates in wide swings of speeds depending an user behaviour, like in the old days with cable

- this raises the question quickly how futureproof the investment would be? How soon before people start to get irritated, before applications arise which hit the ceiling? How soon before you want your own fixed line back?

Remember the early days of DSL. People started to share their expensive DSL-line with their neighbours using wifi. One year later this trend was gone: people were fed up with the hassle and the limitations. They bought their own line.

MLAB

Posted by Willem | February 15 | 2009 12:50 PM | permalink

Recently Measurement Lab was 'unveiled' by its sponsors, among which Google, New America Foundation's Open Technology Institute and the PlanetLab Consortium. As they state themselves on their website: Measurement Lab (M-Lab) is an open, distributed server platform for researchers to deploy Internet measurement tools. The goal of M-Lab is to advance network research and empower the public with useful information about their broadband connections. By enhancing Internet transparency, M-Lab helps sustain a healthy, innovative Internet. The good part is that they launched some interesting tools for Users, among which a tool named 'Glasnost', which tests whether your internet service provider blocks or hinders BitTorrent. Other tools deal with testing your connection speed or with determining whether your ISP is giving priority to some traffic or users above others (coming soon). The not so good part is that they do collect information about you, your IP-address and your ISP. Maybe not so bad, since they are quite open about it, but think whether you want this before using their tools. And a word of warning: they clearly are in the development phase since their tools are not that easy to use. But fun if you enjoy this kind of stuff.

Sign of the times

Posted by Herman | February 09 | 2009 12:02 PM | permalink

The AMS-IX is one of the largest Internet hubs in the world. The statistics on the traffic they manage can be viewed on their website on a daily basis. The recent graphs reveal how Internet has become part of our life.

This graph demonstrates that consumers dominate Internet traffic, not businesses.The peak is in the evening.

The yearly graph shows a marked increase of traffic, starting in the summer at the same time the credit crisis was erupting in full force. In 6-7 months time a jump from 400 Gbps peak to nearly 650 Gbps peak. KPN told me they see a similar increase in traffic in their core network.

One possible explanation, other than people searching in the Internet for more information? More spare time to watch Youtube movies because work pressure eases off with the reduction in economic activity.......

The future of newspapers

Posted by Herman | February 09 | 2009 9:03 AM | permalink

The traditional newspaper business is under pressure. With the rise of Internet, an increasing number of TV channels and more communication facilities people has more choice where to get information. The early erosion was in the 2 bread-and-butter revenue streams: advertisements to buy and sell stuff (now taken over by the likes of Ebay and Marktplaats and Craigslist) and advertisements for personell (Monsterboard and other job-boards). The trend hass accelerated now that other advertisement spending is dropping.

Some people are asking for a bail-out, Sarkozy floats plans for mandatory "free" newspapers for youngsters.

In my opinion, all these measures are looking backwards, trying to shore up an old business model against the tide.

Luckily there are others who look forward: the NY Times has released an API to search through their database. Om Malik has an excellent article on the potential of this new approach.

In my opinion the NY Times gets it: connect and share is the name of the game .

Warpspeed

Posted by Herman | February 07 | 2009 2:15 PM | permalink

For communication technology nothing beats optical transmissions over fibers. The inherent capacity of light is incredibly high. The limiting factor nowadays is the electronics: as soon as you convert light to electrical signals you have to slow down. So researchers around the world are working on all-optical processing of information to bypass this limit.

NetworkWorld reports on a big step forward. It is already well known how to encode 64 channels of 10 Gbps into one wavelenght, totaling 640 Gbps per wavelenght over 1 fiber. Demultiplexing the channels requires optical processing which was a problem until now. The researchers have solved this problem with a clever and small optical waveguide. They estimate that this technology will hit the market in 2012.

We will need it: more Fiber to the Home will put great strain on the backbones.

Dealing in the dark

Posted by Herman | February 06 | 2009 6:15 PM | permalink

Very few people are aware of the fact that very secretive negotiations are being conducted by our governements that could have serious consequences. The so-called Anti Counterfeiting Trade Agreement (ACTA) negotiations have been progressing for a year or more. They were presented as just a discussion on how to do a regular check-up on intellectual copyright law between Western countries and Japan, how to prevent cheap copies of branded luxury items to flood our markets etc.

More and more organizations have gotten wind of the fact that Big Content was trying to get their infamous anti-piracy laws injected into this agreement, bypassing national lawmakers and representative bodies. After all, it is very difficult NOT to ratify a complete body of international agreements which have been negotiated between many countries. If you reject the agreement, you must reject it in total and face the economic damages.

So many groups have tried to get more information on the state of the negotiations, so national and EU-parliaments can influence the negotiations before being confronted with a binary decision. No such luck. A worrying fact.

Ars Technica has an excellent overview of the state of affairs.