A Voice over IP service was to blame for a man in Massachusetts bursting into flames at the weekend.

The man, David Reed, held an executive position at Lotus in the early 1980s, and was a Fellow at HP Labs. He is said to be recovering from the spontaneous human combustion at MIT Media Lab, where he’s on the faculty – and where, we hope, the presence of alarm clocks that run away from people shouldn’t hinder his recovery.

We’re speaking figuratively, of course.

Reed was responding to a discussion on David Farber’s IP list that prompted by last week’s publicity stunt by Skype. We reported this here, but to summarize: Skype, notorious as a closed system, asked the FCC to open its networks to so any device can be attached (which it already can), and create a new standards body so it could nobble the cellular operators’ own standards bodies, and tell them what to do. A fine case of the pot calling the kettle black, we suggested.

But the discussion rapidly turned into a conflagration.

(more…)

eBay’s proprietary VoIP service Skype wants the Federal Communications Commission to change its rules on how cellular networks operate.

It’s demanding that the US regulator extend a 1968 legal decision, which permitted any device to be attached to the AT&T network, to apply to mobile operators. It also wants a new industry body to decide the standards for the networks, and ensure they comply: effectively bypassing the 3GPP (http://www.3gpp.org/), 3GPP2 (http://www.3gpp2.org/) and IETF standards bodies.

“After you”, the operators may well say.

For Skype is a closed system itself, using a proprietary signalling protocol, in contrast to the open SIP (Session Initiation Protocol) family of industry standards. In addition, the Skype client is closed proprietary software – in contrast to the software libre WengoPhone (http://www.openwengo.org/) project, and in contrast to much of the core infrastructure used by VoIP service providers, which is often based on Asterisk (http://www.asterisk.org/), which is available under GPL.

But is the claim justified?
(more…)

Google’s TV chief has admitted the internet is crap for TV. Speaking to the Cable Europe Congress in Amsterdam, Vincent Dureau told attendees:

“The web infrastructure, and even Google’s [infrastructure]…doesn’t scale. It’s not going to offer the quality of service that consumers expect.”

Dureau, is head of TV technology at the ad giant. He candidly admitted that his own YouTube video service was part of the problem.

Engineers point to two different problems with today’s internet. The bandwidth is too low, but more acutely, latency and “jitter” mean the quality of the viewing experience is severely compromised. If an email program, or even one of Google’s YouTube’s Flash-based movies is forced to wait for a second, no one notices. But if a movie keeps hiccuping, no one will use the service again.

Adding to the dilemma is the question of who will invest to fix these problems – and who will end up paying for that investment?

Deloitte and Touche’s recently-published Telecoms Predictions report for 2007 contains a gloomy prediction that escaped almost everyone’s attention. Deloitte’s authors touch on the economics of the “net neutrality” debate, with respect to investment, advising partisans to calm down.

“Clearly, something has to change in the economics of internet access, such that network operators and ISPs can continue to invest in new infrastructure and maintain service quality, and consumers can continue to enjoy the internet as they know it today.”

That caught the attention of pundits. The conclusion, however, didn’t.

(more…)

Robert Kahn, the most senior figure in the development of the internet, has delivered a strong warning against “Net Neutrality” legislation.

Speaking to an audience at the Computer History Museum in Mountain View, California at an event held in his honour, Kahn warned against legislation that inhibited experimentation and innovation where it was needed.

Kahn rejected the term “Net Neutrality”, calling it “a slogan”. He cautioned against dogmatic views of network architecture, saying the need for experimentation at the edges shouldn’t come at the expense of improvements elsewhere in the network.

(Kahn gently reminded his audience that the internet was really about interconnecting networks, a point often lost today).

“If the goal is to encourage people to build new capabilities, then the party that takes the lead is probably only going to have it on their net to start with and it’s not going to be on anyone else’s net. You want to incentivize people to innovate, and they’re going to innovate on their own nets or a few other nets,”

“I am totally opposed to mandating that nothing interesting can happen inside the net,” he said.

(more…)

“It sure would be nice, but it doesn’t have much chance of happening because of market power, size, etc. I think it would be real hard to do. I don’t think the regulators would let that happen, in my judgment.” – Ed Whitacre on the possibility of taking over BellSouth, 2005.

The definition of a Southern Gentleman, it’s said, is someone so charming they can hand you your guts back on a plate – and you thank them.

If that’s the case, then AT&T CEO Ed Whitacre can have few peers in the charm sweeps. Whitacre has dispatched potential opposition to AT&T’s corporate expansion with the insouciance of a lion swatting a fly with its tail. Victory was complete shortly before the New Year, when the FCC agreed to Whitacre’s second mega-merger in the space of two years without hampering the emerging behemoth. The US regulator signed off on the AT&T-BellSouth merger that Whitacre himself had said he thought impossible, only 15 months earlier.

It’s been a masterpiece of misdirection. Whether by happy accident or design, Whitacre sent the opposition down a dead end, focusing its attention on a non-issue – or more accurately, an “issue” he himself created. The FCC applied the coup de grace with just one one sentence on December 29.

As the product of a series of mergers, AT&T now employs over 300,000 people and turns over $115bn in revenue – eleven Googles, or four Intels. The deal signed off by the FCC over the holidays also gives AT&T full control of Cingular, the United States’ second largest cellular network. Can there be anyone happier in the telecoms business tonight than Whitacre?

In a decade, American consumers have seen the number of Regional Bell Operating Companies (RBOCs), or Baby Bells, coalesce from six down to just three: the odd man out, Qwest, the RBOC which covers the sparsely populated Mountain states, is surely next on AT&T’s menu.

The extraordinary thing is that all this took place at a time in the wake of the fall out from the telecoms bubble. The Bells enjoyed little affection from the public in any case, long before Global Crossing and MCI. and with an unpopular Republican President, Democrats can have been expected to push a few populist buttons, and hear some bells.

What actually happened is that Whitacre got everything he wanted, but only thanks to the aid of The Democratic Party, most of whom aren’t aware how thoroughly they’ve been outwitted.

Now that’s style.

Let’s see how he did it.

(more…)

Few start-ups encapsulate the desperate utopianism of the times so much as Fon Technology.

Created by the Argentinian dot.com billionaire Martin Varsavsky, who built and sold the Spanish portal Ya.com and ISP Jazztel before the bubble burst, at the heart of Fon is a soulful of hope.
(more…)

Don’t expect Bono to descend from a cloud. Or orgasmic praise from the Wall Street Journal’s Walt Mossberg. When PlayLouder quietly rolls out its music service in the UK, it won’t initially match the razzle-dazzle of the iTunes Music Store launch, Rhapsody or the other million dollar marketing blitzes.

But the initial, low-key ‘soft launch’ of the first legal file swapping service to be backed by one of the major labels is deceptive. PlayLouder MSP offers something quite revolutionary, and its fate is more likely to shape the future of digital music distribution than anything we’ve seen to date.

(more…)

Re-monopolizing the phone service 

US telecoms regulator the FCC has signaled the end of the independent ISP, a move which will leave DSL provision concentrated in the hands of just a few large providers. The move, which turns local DSL provision from a regulated monopoly into an unregulated monopoly, also has repercussions for rural telephony providers, who will lose a chunk of subsidy, and has potentially chilling consequences for free speech.

Unless state regulators step into the void just vacated by the Federal regulator, however, every independent DSL provider will find itself at the mercy of the Baby Bells when its contract expires – and the Baby Bells have no compulsion to renew those competitors’ contracts. (more…)

We’ve been reading stories about the “end of the internet” ever since the internet was exposed to the public more than a decade ago. Telcos, media companies, infrastructure hardware providers, and operating systems monopolists have all taken their turn as the villain in this particular drama. So far not one has succeeded.

But the really scary thing about “the end of the internet” was never how easily it could be achieved, but that it might be welcomed by most of the people who actually use it. Now Google has helped drive the point home.
(more…)

“The Internet is becoming more and more widespread and will increasingly represent a scientific random sample of the population,” claims ICANN’s newest board member, Joi Ito. Quite what scientific experiments he will wish to perform, once the desired sample size has been reached, remains a mystery. But like many people who spend too long in front of their computers, he’s talking about a Platonic ideal rather than the real world.

A survey by the US Department of Commerce’s National Telecommunications and Information Administration shows that the internet has entrenched the divide between rich and poor, and the races. Statistics reveal an internet that’s overwhelmingly white, wealthy and urban. And the net’s best days may even be behind it. The pace of internet adoption has tapered off to a trickle, with a substantial part of the population not interested in the internet at any price.
(more…)