SMART Letter #55
SMART PEOPLE GET FRESH
April 24, 2001
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SMART Letter #55 -- April 24, 2001
Copyright 2001 by David S. Isenberg
isen.com -- "little fish with economy of scale"
isen@isen.com -- http://isen.com/ -- 1-888-isen-com
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CONTENTS
> Smart Remarks from SMART People
> Anonymous at Global Crossing on Service Providers
> Richard Nelson on N.Z. Black Caps
> Joe Abley on All the Things I got Wrong about New Zealand
> John Kawakami on Internet Earthquakes
> Robert Mittman on Internet Earthquakes
> Dr Strangecode on Preserving Incumbent Advantage
> Anonymous at Accenture on The Meaning of Accenture
> John Kawakami on The Meaning of Accenture
> Peter Cochrane on his Bit Budget
> Ken Poulton on Bit Budgets and Market Experiences
> Harry Wilker on "Good Principle Incorrectly Applied"
> Ang Peng Hwa on History of Copyrights
> Tom Kobayashi on Usen -- 10 Mbit/s for $50/month in Japan
> Christopher on "Nice Guy, Mike Powell"
> Comic Strip Reality -- A Note from Scatt Oddams
> Conferences on my Calendar
> Copyright Notice, Administrivia
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Smart Remarks from SMART People:
"Anonymous at Global Crossing" takes issue with certain "blithe
statements" in SMART Letter #54a:
"I'm a fairly new reader . . . occasionally you make
blithe statements that I must differ with. To say
that an open access wholesale model 'is the only
workable strategy for the Internet era' is tantamount
to saying that Internet e-tailing will kill bricks and
mortar retailers."
I reply:
I try not to assume too much, but I do take for granted that
members of the SMART List have read 'Rise of the Stupid Network'
or have seen one of my talks. I use these platforms to explain
how and why the Internet is making the network stupid and
pushing value creation to the edge. I don't think I've ever
before publicly suggested that somebody hire me (indeed, reading
my paper would be a more cost-effective exercise) but if you
don't see the logic, you really should have me in for a day.
Anonymous at Global Crossing continues:
"The wholesale open access model only works for
enterprises (or carriers, for that matter) that are
technically sophisticated enough, and buy in
sufficient volume, to benefit from it. Enterprises
still need "services" -- those little things like
provisioning, network features, VPNs, the ability to
originate and terminate voice, customer and end user
support, etc. Not every enterprise (nor even most of
them, IMHO) have a strong desire to be, in effect, a
telecom carrier cum managed service provider. It's
not a core competency for most; it's an expensive and
complex distraction.:
I reply:
I agree that customers need to buy in sufficient volume to
really make it work. This opens the door to service providers
like Yipes, who, in turn, serve smaller customers. But more
importantly, "wholesale open access" lets enterprises hire third
parties with sufficient networking expertise to create new,
enterprise-owned network.
The Internet commoditizes transport. When facilities are
commodities, "facilities-based-x" models and the fat margins
that used to go with them become obsolete. In an Internet
world, facility owners can provide higher-layer services, but
they have no special advantage in doing so.
Conversely, an all-Internet world requires carriers that want to
stay in business to deliver the most bits per buck. Network
management services are best implemented as an independent
layer, so these, too, can be implemented at lowest cost, e.g.,
by third-party providers.
Furthermore, with the erasure of the LAN/WAN boundary, i.e.,
with WANs moving towards the simplicity of LANS, people with
fewer skills and less training can provision and run such
networks.
These trends are hard to see for people who assume telco-style,
vertically integrated business models. But such selective
blindness is easy to understand. It is typical for purveyors of
old models to see disruptive technologies as inferior,
unreliable and impractical right up to the moment that their
lunch gets eaten. The slide rule guys looked at calculators and
said, "Hah! They can't do cosines." Now Pickett and Keufel &
Esser are gonzo. The great houses of sail saw steam as dirty,
dangerous, unreliable, inefficient and non-traditional. Not a
one of the big sailing merchants became a significant player in
the age of steamships.
Anonymous from Global Crossing continues:
"And let's not even talk about enterprises developing
the internal infrastructure for 99.999 voice service
on an IP network. (The predictions by a certain large
IP equipment manufacturer of "free voice", and more
recently, "free data" are, at best, self-serving hype.
Haven't we learned anything about purblind business
models over the last year?) No IT/Telecom manager
will survive if they in-source and get 90%, 80%, 70%,
or less call completion, leaving delay and jitter out
of it. I think that your notion -- wholesaling dumb
pipes to enterprises -- works for a *very* few that
have *extremely* mission-critical telecom needs *and*
the equivalent of a carrier as an internal resource.
And that's a dying breed."
I reply:
I think you're making a mistake to think that either:
(a) conventional telecom actually delivers 5 nines end-to-end
(see my "Myth of 5 Nines" on the isen.com website) or
(b) that today's high-line non-facilities based Internet
Telephony providers (iBasis, ITXC, etc.) have call
completions as low as 90%.
[What do other SMART People think? Should Global Crossing hire
me to give them the word? That is, might they be able to learn
from me? Or should I give up and sell my Global Crossing stock?
(Sheesh! I thought Global Crossing's days of Hindery-think were
gone.) Or am I unclear, wrong, etc.? -- David I]
---
Richard Nelson <richard.nelson@eng.monash.edu.au> picks
up a critical error in SMART Letter #54a:
"One small correction . . . The NZ cricket team is
not called the All Blacks. The All Blacks play rugby
. . . Cynical people might suggest that the Black Caps
are capitalizing on the All Blacks reputation."
---
Joe Abley [jabley@automagic.org], a former New Zealand resident
now living in Canada, sticks it to me for even more egregious
errors in SMART Letter #54a:
"+ The All Blacks are a rugby team. The national
Cricket team is called the Black Caps.
[Enough! I live in New Jersey, and I don't even know whether
the New Jersey Jets play baseball or hockey -- David I]
"+ Wellington is New Zealand's capital,
not capitol.
[Ouch! Shoulda listened in 5th grade -- David I]
Joe Abley continues:
"+ Telstra New Zealand (a startup telco, funded by
Telstra Corp. in Australia) and Saturn Communications
(a cable company based in Wellington) merged to form
Telstra Saturn a year or so ago. Telstra Saturn is
building an under-sea fiber loop joining Auckland,
Wellington and Christchurch, and is also doing
extensive metro fibre and residential HFC networks in
all three cities. The Wellington plant has been
providing competition for CityLink for ages.
"+ It's CityLink, not CityNet. CityLink is building out
in Auckland now, too. Richard Naylor is a very smart
person (although possibly not SMART, unless he's
lurking on your list); Richard put the Wellington City
Council bylaws on a gopher server back in the day, to
make WCC the first government entity in the world to
publish government business over the internet. At the
time, Apple used the WCC gopher server internally as
an example of what government would be like in the
future.
"+ CLEAR Communications, the original competition to
the incumbent, operates a national fibre backbone as
well as extensive metro networks in Auckland,
Wellington, Christchurch, and a host of smaller towns
and cities around the company.
"+ Southern Cross carries Australian traffic between
Auckland and Fiji, too. So Kiwis don't get the full
forty gigs to themselves.
"+ The NZ Government plan to ensure 9.6 kbit/s
access to everybody in the country is frequently held
up to public derision. The vast majority of New
Zealand is incredibly sparsely populated. Getting
more than 9.6kbit/s data access over long, long analog
copper lines that struggle to carry voice is not a
trivial engineering (or economic) decision. Two thirds
of the country lives in Auckland, Wellington and
Christchurch. The remaining million people are spread
out over an area the size of the UK. At the other end
of the bandwidth spectrum, CityLink is delivering 100
Mbit/s residential Internet service in Wellington over
Ethernet, and it is talking about a city-wide 802.11b
network. (These wireless plans may not be entirely
public yet.).
[Other countries with sparse rural populations are setting their
goals higher. For example, Sweden's goal is 5 Mbit/s to every
home. (However, according to certain knowledgeable Swedes, it
is a goal, not a program.) And where is it written that data
must travel on "long, long analog copper lines"? -- David I]
---
John Kawakami [johnk@woodstock.com] comments on First Internet
Earthquake in SMART Letter #53:
"The first Internet earthquake may have been the
Northridge quake in 1994. I caught it in an IRC chat
channel, and people were relaying information from the
area, noting what was working and what was not."
---
Robert Mittman [rmittman@iftf.org], of Institute for the Future,
provides similar info on First Internet Earthquake in SMART
Letter #53:
"The 1994 Northridge quake was probably the first
Internet quake. AOL's chat lines lit up; there was
real-time news flying around; I made e-mail contact
with a friend there well before I could make voice
contact with him. I also made contact with a relative
I couldn't reach by phone by having someone I met
online make a local call, connect with the relative,
then e-mail me back. The 'net was not nearly as
widespread then, but was a prime source of news and
connection.
"Also, in the recent quake in India, there were reports
of the Internet playing a similar role."
[OK, OK. Northridge was the first Internet Earthquake.
David I]
---
Saul "Dr. Strangecode" Aguiar [aguiars@primenet.com], one of the
original SMART People, comments on Preserving Incumbent
Advantage in SMART Letter #53
"I have been laughing about the desperate acts of our
clueless Congressional and Executive branches in
attempting to regulate cutting-edge technologies. For
years the spooks have done everything possible to
impede the distribution of privacy-enhancing
technologies like PGP, yet they recently acknowledged
that middle-eastern loonies have been using Internet
porn sites as dead-letter drops.
"Entertainment companies are standing on their heads
[Now *that's* entertainment! -- David I] to protect
their artificial monopolies. Their problem is quite
simple: digital music eventually does have to be
converted into analog signals. At that point, hidden
information breaks down. There is no practical way to
prevent someone from making an analog copy of
something and then re-digitizing it.
"Remember software that employed dongles (those stupid
pass-through encoders which plug in to the PC's
parallel port)? Napster is a short-term idea that
will die because it parallels the old Bell hierarchy;
the choke point is the Napster website. This choke
point is Napster's re-creation of the Bell System's
Service Control Point (SCP).
"Post-Napster distributed peer-to-peer systems like
Gnutella will be impossible to stop. (Long live the
Stupid Network!). If our Federal representatives
think that they can outlaw peer-to-peer transactions,
they'd better get LOTS of cash from the lobbyists
because they will quickly find themselves unemployed
and replaced by populist candidates. Remember the
anti-incumbent sentiment of the 90's (Ross Perot,
etc.)?
"After 21 years working for various large corporations,
I can assure you that your description of how people
advance is very close to the mark. I left Honeywell
Commercial Flight Systems in 1988 to try my hand in
the telecommunications world. Since then, most of the
people who have risen the highest are not the clearest
thinkers or most creative. They were the ones who were
most adept at playing The Game."
---
"Anonymous at Accenture", comments on Accenture?
Bullshient! -- SMART Letter #52:
"I have been in tech consulting for about three years
now, and I have recently joined Accenture. I agree
with you that consulting firms 'rip off' their
clients, but the reason why they pay us the big bucks
is because the clients either
1) don't have enough manpower to take on or complete
their projects,
2) don't have the expertise in house,
3) want someone else to do their dirty work.
[These are a few of my favorite things . . . David I]
"But I am writing to explain what Accenture means. It
is supposed to mean 'Accent on the Future'. The name
is innovative, and also represents what Accenture
wants to be a maker of. I just wanted to let you know
that although the name sounds funny, it was submitted
by an Andersen Consulting employee and selected over
hundreds of submissions for the new name.
"I was wondering if you think these other names are
silly (I like them): Agilent (agile), Scient (to
know), Celera (to accelerate), Cingular (Cellular +
singular) . . ."
[Indeed, I did NOT know that an Andersen Consulting employee
invented the Accenture name -- this adds some cred to an
otherwise totally silly situation. As for the other names, no,
sorry, I like a name that actually provides information, about
who you are or what you do, or both. isen.com doesn't even pass
this test with flying colors. So how should I rename my
enterprise, SMART People? -- David I]
---
John Kawakami responds to Accenture? Bullshient! -- SMART
Letter #52:
"It's all about the billable hours. Before long,
these consulting companies will be honoring each
other with awards for innovations in increased
billable hours.
"Accenture sounds like "censure" or "censor". Maybe
the name says, "You'd better hire us, or you're
screwed, you no-talent middle manager! The CTO will
chew you out. Again!"
"Here are my attempts at branding humor: Ansource (yet
another source), Dinesis (active finance), Sucressence
(only sweetness here), Avade (if you don't ask, we
won't tell), Alize, Prisem (with our rainbow vision,
we'll extract something), Viron (a unit of illness),
Enterpret (comes in and explains something vast),
Monicast (we disperse funds), Abilant (we're happy
when we're able), Confex (expansive bulging
communications), NextLyre (another instrument, another
player, another alluring song), Azila (large, scaly,
quick), Monade (when life give you "mon"s, we make
it), Gresett, Sabot (dutch for wooden shoe), Vanipol
(a nation of preeners), Ferroga (macho, and vaguely
italian), Ioni (not quite ionic), Imbex (a stupid
market)."
---
Peter Cochrane [petercochrane@conceptlabs.net] responds to my
query in SMART Letter #52 about whether 1 Gigabyte per month is
a reasonable throughput budget:
"I'd encourage you to take a second look. I do over
1GByte/year in straight email alone! I cannot imagine
you do less! I just checked -- I am averaging just
over 12,000 sent/replied to email messages/year."
[Thanks, Peter. I'd guess you're a pretty strong example
of a corner case -- David I]
-------
Ken Poulton [poulton@labs.agilent.com] a Palo Alto CA fiber
activist, responds to my query in SMART Letter #52 about whether
1 Gbyte per month is a reasonable throughput budget:
"My e-mail record on my at-work system says:
0.04 GBytes/month last year in personally-handled mail
0.02 GBytes/month in unique weather data messages
(sent hourly to Bay Area windsurfers)
1.50 GBytes/month when you count the 400 weather
subscribers
"My home Unix system (used as a remote work terminal):
1.9 GBytes/month
"So even these rather heavy corner-case uses are only a
few GBytes per month. Most users would be hard-
pressed to get to a GByte/month until they turned on
streaming video or Internet radio stations. Those
could get your usage up to around 10-20 GByte/month at
24 hours/day.
"In the Palo Alto Fiber to the Home Trial, we
considered a service that would be limited to 1
GByte/month. I continue to believe this is a
perfectly reasonable way to operate, but I can tell
you from experience that it's a hard sell to consumers
when you're offering a 100 Mbit/s pipe that can (in
principle) use up your month's quota in 80 seconds.
"For starters, we settled on an unlimited service that
is 100 Mbit/s to the hub, but uses a shared 10 Mbit/s
connection to the Internet. Locally-served services,
such as video-on-demand, can make good use of the
local 100 Mbit/s, but Internet access (where the BW
gets expensive) will be limited. We have not turned on
the system yet, so we can't tell how it will work out
yet.
"The problem is non-trivial: $100/month only pays for a
*continuous* usage of about 100 kbit/s. You can get a
*lot* of benefit from peak rates of 100 Mbit/s, but
you have to deal with the people who will suck you dry
with a server farm if you let them.
"A pay-per-GByte system (like 1 GByte free, $100/GByte
thereafter) will never ding most people, and charge
big users appropriately. But it makes consumers
(justifiably) nervous. What if you get a $1300 bill
when your son leaves on the Internet radio 24 hours a
day for a month? Simply cutting people off doesn't
work either.
"What I think is needed is to allow consumers to choose
full speed access up to 1 GB/month, and then throttled
BW after that. Your connection may get slow, but
doesn't die. And you don't get a huge bill by
surprise. I suspect this will need special support in
the routers or some kind of special billing box.
Anyone care to support this in their routers?"
---
Harry Wilker [hwilker@yahoo.com] adds his comments to mine
regarding George Gilder's misguided call to deregulate the ILECs
in SMART Letter #52:
"I have been watching the new administration's
rhetoric. Their predisposition to dislike all
government oversight seems likely to reinforce the
stranglehold the ILECS have on the local loop, with
the consequence of stalling the last-mile rollout even
more. Did you happen to see Powell on CNBC about ten
days ago? He *sounded* like he understood the issue.
He talked about requiring the ILECs to be truly
competitive, but somehow I'm not yet convinced.
Unfortunately Gilder's position on this seems to be
the predominant conservative viewpoint -- an example
of a good principle incorrectly applied."
---
Ang Peng Hwa [TPHANG@ntu.edu.sg] gives information on the
history of copyrights in response to my diatribe in SMART
Letter #51:
"On copyright, the first use of the right to make
copies was really for censorship purposes. The King
wanted to control what was printed (copied). So only
certain people had the right to make copies.
"I appreciate your magnanimity in pointing out your own
errors. Alas, few people are like you."
[I pointed out my mistakes . . . but I was wrong. -- David I]
---
Tom Kobayashi [t_kobayashi@triangletech.com] sends word
of Usen, a Japanese optical access carrier:
"SMART Letter #51 reminds me of the Japanese government
and NTT. NTT has been very slow in allowing
competitors' ADSL equipment to be installed in NTT
facilities saying "there is not enough space" etc.,
etc. Finally, though, the Japanese government has
realized that Japan is way behind the U.S., Korea,
Singapore, etc., in building broadband communications
infrastructure. It declared that Japan will provide
broadband to the home by the end of year 2005.
"In April 2001 Usen (a Japanese service provider) is
going to offer in 5 Wards of Tokyo 10Mbit/s fiber
services at a flat rate of less than $50! Criticized
by the government and threatened by competition, even
NTT is now offering ADSL services at $30/mo. I am
beginning to believe that Japan could surpass the US
in availability and affordability of broadband
communications services. Once Japan puts the act
together, it moves in the same direction quickly."
[A Google search for Usen turned up an article in Slashdot that
claimed Usen was selling 100 Mbit/s for US$50. The Usen Web
site is in Japanese. Updates and additional information on Usen
appreciated! -- David I]
---
Christopher [christopher@yomailbox.com] follows up on Chairman
Powell's FCC -- SMART Letter #50:
"I was reading a c|net News.com article about Powell's
first public appearance. It said, 'Powell also
resisted taking a stand on the thorny issue of open
access, where Internet service providers can gain
access to proprietary systems such as a cable
broadband network. However, his comments couldn't have
warmed the hearts of open-access advocates.
"''Openness is not always good,' [Powell] said.
Companies need to make a profit to survive [he
continued].'
"'The c|net article went on. 'His sympathy for
struggling companies had limits, however. Asked if
there was something the FCC could do to help the
independent DSL . . . Powell sounded downright
Darwinian. 'Some of it is poor implementation, some
of it is poor execution,' Powell said.'
"So on the one hand, companies need a closed system to
survive and make a profit, but on the other hand, if
your company is a victim of a closed system, too bad
because you are obviously executing (or implementing)
poorly. I don't think Covad is struggling because it
doesn't know how to implement DSL; I'm sure Earthlink
isn't struggling because they have a poor execution of
ISP services. No, I have to believe that Earthlink's
problems are linked to its inability to build a rival
cable network in twenty minutes.
"Nice guy, Michael Powell. I don't think he gets it."
"P.S. It seems to me that merely separating
infrastructure providers from service providers would
open up competition."
[The separation between services and facilities is so sensible
that even AT&T's C. Michael Armstrong has been advocating for it
lately. Some state PUCs (e.g., Pennsylvania's) seem to be
moving in this direction too. Mike Powell is a SMART Person, so
I'm still hoping he sees the diametric difference between the
freedom of a big company to do business as usual and the freedom
of a small company to create new wealth through innovation. --
David I]
-------
COMIC STRIP REALITY
by David S. Isenberg
When life waxed weird in my last days at AT&T, I'd vent by
writing stupid essays. My friend Scatt Oddams (not his real
name), reacting to identical frustrations, drew stick-figure
comic strips. These were actually truer than my writing, and
sometimes they were even funny too! He was freer than I was to
take direct pokes at the latest absurd AT&T press release, and
to mock how AT&T's execs were detached from the reality
experienced by AT&T's workers and customers. Indeed, Scatt
Oddams gave me new appreciation for the power of a cartoon.
I haven't heard from Scatt for a long time. I hear he's a free
agent now, with no time for new cartoons. But just last week he
wrote to me:
>David -- Check out these Web comic strips! You know
>Scott McCloud? He's such a genius. His strip below
>tells why anonymous on-line payment would be good for
>creativity -- and hints at why certain incumbent parties
>want anonymous payment to get lost and stay lost, see:
>http://www.thecomicreader.com/html/icst/icst-5/icst-5.html.
>
>Also, do you know Ian Thomas? He is the US Geological
>Survey cartographer who was fired by George II's oil
>slickers for making maps of Alaskan caribou calving areas.
>(I'm shocked(!!), shocked(!!!!!) that people get was fired
>for putting scientific information on the Internet. It's
>so *1984*. Ve suppressed da maps. Ve didn't vant dem to
>know dat da caribou give birt where ve vant to pump oil!)
>Now Ian has put the banned maps on an independent website,
>http://www.maptricks.com/. Maptricks also has a link to a caribou's-
>eye comic strip on oil exploration:
>http://www.cariboutrek.org/story/.
>Have fun! -- Scatt Oddams
-------
CONFERENCES ON MY CALENDAR
May 1-2, 2001, Richardson TX. Jeff Pulver's SIP Summit. I will
put something together on "Why SIP is hip", scheduled for Monday
5/1, 4:30 to 5:30. Don't come to hear me, though. Come to
understand why SIP is appropriate end-to-end Internet
communications technology at the feet of experts like Henning
Schulzrinne and Jonathan Rosenberg. Info and registration
materials at http://pulver.com/sip2001
May 16, 2001, New York City. I'll be speaking at about 6:00 PM
at the Wharton Club of New York City. SMART People welcome! I
think there might be a modest registration fee. Contact Jim
Synk for more info -- Jim.Synk@icn.siemens.com
July 1-2, 2001, London UK. World Technology Summit and Awards.
I will be giving a keynote speech on the usual topic(s).
Twenty-four awards will be made for technologic contributions in
almost every human endeavo(u)r. Find out more at
http://www.wtn.net/
-------
COPYRIGHT NOTICE: Redistribution of this document, or any
part of it, is permitted for non-commercial purposes,
provided that the two lines below are reproduced with it:
Copyright 2001 by David S. Isenberg
isen@isen.com -- http://www.isen.com/ -- 1-888-isen-com
-------
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