Telepocalypse

Peak Telecoms

The view from the summit is over here.

Premium promotion - @DAPremium

Disruptive Analysis has launched a new premium Tweeting service. It's no secret Dean's insights are both highly-read and highly-regarded. Now his best up-to-the-minute reflections on what's going on in telecoms are behind a paywall. I (and many others I am sure) wish him well in making some lucre from this very interesting business model experiment!

Bleg: Future of Voice in Asia

If anyone knows any good business partners to deliver Future of Voice workshops in Asia, please do get in touch.

The kind of person we're looking for is likely to have a deep industry network with professional services expertise. Someone with consultative selling skills, marketing prowess and technology thought leadership.

We're also looking for sponsors for North American events.

Future of Voice workshop - sold out

Next week's Future of Voice workshop is now sold out. Contact me if you want to join a waiting list - we can upscale the venue if enough additional people are interested and willing to cover the cost.

Blog post on UC over at futureofcomms.com

This blog is suffering from bit-rot, with the hosting service changing versions of Perl and wanting another $240 to host it for a year. So I'm switching over to www.futureofcomms.com for future blog posts until I work out what to do with Telepocalypse.

I've just posted 3 CHALLENGES OF UNIFIED COMMS ON UNIFIED NETWORKS. I hope you enjoy it!

Future of Voice workshop - last few places

If you'd like to come to the Future of Voice workshop next week in central London, get in touch with me at futureofvoice@martingeddes.com for a discount code. More info at www.futureofcomms.com. We've got an interesting group of people coming!

October Future of Comms newsletter is out

If you missed the first Future of Communications newsletter, you can still read it here. If you'd like to avoid missing future newsletters, sign up at www.futureofcomms.com.

There is a 2-for-1 offer in the newsletter for the upcoming Future of Voice workshop in London on 27th October.

Future of Communications newsletter

I've decided to invest the time and energy to share the best ideas and links I find each month, and also to keep people up to date with the cutting-edge subject areas I tend to work on. In return, you have to offer up a little of your attention via your email inbox. (Email - the original and best social medium!)

The newsletter covers some of the topic areas from the Future of Voice workshops I am doing in collaboration with Dean Bubley. For more information on the workshops, go to www.futureofcomms.com.

To subscribe to the newsletter, click here.

I've thought about blogging this stuff, but decided that putting content out there with no reciprocity from the reader (money, attention, data) is a fool's errand.

Announcing 27th October London Future of Voice workshop

Myself and Dean Bubley will be running the next in our successful series of Future of Voice workshops in London on 27th October.

The workshop is an interactive learning and networking event, limited to 20 attendees. This is a particularly exciting time, given the challenge of 'over the top' providers to core telco voice and messaging products, and the response of telcos: RCS as the formal industry standard route, as well as a variety of their own 'over the top' services. Add in shifting business models, delivery technologies and ecosystems and it will be a packed day. If your company or livelihood depends on understanding where voice service is going, and you want to know what you peers are thinking, you should be there.

To learn more about the event and see what people said about previous events in California and London, go to www.futureofcomms.com. The registration link is here.

Truths about telecoms

I recently gave a talk at a private event, and I thought I would re-post some of my speaker notes here. I have edited out some personal stories that I don't want to reproduce here.

There are two parts to this post. Firstly four lessons from life; and then four beliefs I have about the future of the tech and telecoms industry.

The thread that joins these is the difference between truth and belief, and how we use magical thinking as a defence against uncomfortable truths.

(Apologies that comments are broken; my archaic Movable Type installation has gone kaput.)

Future of Voice on TelecomTV

Myself and Dean Bubley went to the TelecomTV studios last month to capture our thoughts and insights having just completed the first two Future of Voice workshops in California and London.

You can review the resulting videos here: Part 1, Part 2, Part 3.

The next event will be in London on 27th October, and we are working towards a late November date for the US East Coast. More information at www.futureofcomms.com.

TelecomTV - Future of Voice

Following our successful California and London Future of Voice workshops, myself and Dean Bubley worked with TelecomTV to make a recording of some of our key insights and lessons.

You can get more information on the TelecomTV website here, and the direct link to the 25 minute video is here.

If you are involved in voice and messaging strategy at an operator or network equipment vendor, you're likely to find watching this video is a very good use of half an hour of your time. If you have any feedback, please do get in touch.

In related news, we are pleased to announce the next London event will be on 27 October. More information at www.futureofcomms.com.

The Network of Probabilities

At eComm, I interviewed on stage Neil Davies, founder of Predictable Network Solutions. (Disclosure: they are a consulting client, we are working together to commercialise their technology.) The transcript of the interview is up on the eComm blog, titled The Internet is Not a Pipe and Bandwidth is Bad.

Neil's achievement is a breakthrough advance in the use of applied mathematics to describe behaviours of statistically multiplexed networks. The consequences are potentially widespread across the telecoms industry. The problem is that the mental models we use -- of pipes, flow, bandwidth -- do not match the reality of statistical multiplexing. This mismatch drives us into endless small fixes that deeply sub-optimise the overall use of the capacity available.

Historically we have build the "Network of Promises" (with a hat tip to Bob Frankston for the naming inspiration). Technologies like circuit-switching, ATM and IMS perform capacity reservation, admission control, and session management. Together they provide complete predictability and control -- at a price of an "all or nothing" approach. Once the network is fully reserved -- that's it -- and if someone reserves capacity and doesn't use it, tough luck. The result is a costly and inflexible network.

In contrast, the Internet is a generative "Network of Possibilities". The application and user discover what is possible. There is constantly variable capacity and quality, and we adapt to the discovered "network weather". Skype may work, it may not; video may be high definition, low definition, or unusable depending on what else is going on. We can tip the scales in favour of some applications using QoS, but that comes at a cost. When we prioritise some packets, we end up shrinking the overall value-carrying capacity of the transmission system. The more time-sensitive the traffic, the more the shrinkage when we prioritise. The downside of this approach is that the only real answer to poor network quality is more capacity. This may work for core networks, but becomes unaffordable for access networks.

What Neil has discovered is that we have been modelling our networks at the wrong logical layer, and have fundamentally misunderstood the control theory around how data is managed. Instead of managing packets, we need to manage something two logical layers higher: flows of packets over time. With the right mathematical "lens" to see the time-based effects, a new and much simpler way of building and managing networks emerges.

This "Network of Probabilities" works with networks that have statistically stable properties over short periods (milliseconds to seconds) -- as most do have. His technology can reduce the network to two control points, entry and exit in each direction. (More complex topologies, e.g. with CDNs, can also be managed, but at added complexity to signalling and maths.) Packets are re-ordered and dropped in a new way, such that they (virtually) never "self-contend" on their onward journey, and all subsequent buffering can be eliminated.

Any link or network segment that can saturate can now be managed in a new way. The "pie" of quality attenuation (loss and delay budget) is kept constant, but can be allocated in a fine-grained way to different flows over the network. There is still a longer-term adaptation of applications to the sensed network conditions; there is no magic to overcome the fundamental (and variable) capacity of the network.

The bottom line? We can load up networks to 100% of capacity, mix multiple classes of traffic together, and also add in scavenger traffic (with no cost impact on the rest of the network).

It's like the Philosopher's Stone of telecoms, with one difference: it exists.

London Future of Voice masterclass - last call

The next Future of Voice masterclass with myself and Dean Bubley is on Thursday 14th July (this week) at Qualcomm's offices in Chiswick. We are nearly full - and it's quite a roll-call of voice industry players. If you'd like to grab one of the last places, go to www.futureofcomms.com.

If you're a solo entrepreneur/innovator, or work for a non-profit with an interest in voice, and you'd add value to the other attendees by simply by your experience, point of view, or novel technology - get in touch. There's one last "wildcard" place for someone suitably interesting.

Future of Voicemail

At our Future of Voice Masterclass in London next Thursday, myself and Dean Bubley will be covering how new Google-like business models can re-shape the market for voicemail. When we presented the same ideas at our California event last week, they generated plenty of interest and debate.

The timing is rather appropriate given how voicemail is rather in the news for the wrong reasons.

The proximate reasons are easy to see. The product and processes around voicemail are insecure. The service is easily prone to attack from both the technical and human perspective. Ordinary human motivations to pry and profit easily overcome moral qualms about such intrusion.

There are, however, much deeper issues going on around the vertical integration of the transport of voice, and the separate application we call 'telephony'. (This process of fragmentation of voice into many forms and markets is the heart of the Masterclass.) The market for voicemail is tied to that for telephony, which is in turn tied to the market for 'voice minutes' that is based on a limited number of spectrum licenses and copper networks. That whole stack is slowly falling apart, despite a corset of regulatory stays that holds the ungainly edifice in place.

There is no fundamental reason why the 'minutes' I buy have to be used for the telephony application supplied by my operator. Yes, there are many legacy technical issues, such as HLRs, numbering, etc. that stand in the way of me using my 'voice minutes' with any application, such as Skype. But those are not intrinsic. We can expect to see Facebook, Skype, Xbox and Facetime voice take equal stage with telephony.

An example of how stuck we are comes from my personal experience. I moved to an uber-value deal with Tesco Mobile -- £10/month for 500 minutes, unlimited texts and data. Of course, I missed the drawback - which was bad enough that I decided to amuse myself with a consumer complaint to the regulator, Ofcom:

Tesco Mobile does not support standard GSM features of call waiting and forwarding. This forces me to use Tesco's voicemail, and not any third party system such as Hullomail. This is not advertised, and effectively creates a monopoly for Tesco to supply voicemail during the contract period in a non-transparent and anti-competitive manner.

To which the response was:

There is no regulatory obligation on any provider to offer additional services such as call waiting and voicemail. Whether or not to allow access to such services is a commercial decision by each company. We are therefore unable to help with this matter.

(If anyone from Ofcom is reading, feel free to go look to inquiry ref 1-172103617.)

Now, from their framing of the world, their response makes sense. But in other markets, like automotive servicing, it has been decreed that tying the VAS to the core product is against the public interest and thus illegal when they can reasonably be expected to be separate markets.

Isn't it about time that people had a real choice of voicemail providers -- some of which might even take security seriously? That means at sign-up for a 'minutes' contract, you aren't simply defaulted to the access provider's service, but have a menu to choose from.

If you would like to explore these ideas further, do come to the Future of Voice Masterclass in London next Thursday. We still have some space available, and for Telepocalypse readers there is a 25% discount on the entry using code VIP25. Details and sign-up link at www.futureofcomms.com.