The really important stuff

A couple of days ago, Professor Weinberger was complaining that the diaper-wearing nutcase feminist astronaut story was going to wipe out serious news for two weeks, but that cable news obsession will probably pale in comparison with what I expect to be an avalanche of fake mourning for Anna Nicole Smith, arguably the most worthless example of misspent protoplasm in recent history.

John Cole notes the irony:

I can not be alone in my observation that it is rather humorous that the person who most likely will rescue two feminists from public scrutiny is a stripper/turned Playmate who graduated into a full-fledged celebrity drunk, an addict and alcoholic through and through, as well as a terrible mother.

No dude, you aren’t alone.

Oh, by the way, there’s some sort of trial thing going on in Washington, but the tragic loss of America’s Princess depressed the prosecutor so bad he had to rest his case. Or something.

AT&T learing Google’s lesson

Just as Google is finally fessing up that video can kill the Internet, AT&T is learning a similar lesson (WSJ subs only):

AT&T’s big bet on using Internet technology to vault ahead of rival cable operators in the television-distribution business is beginning to look more like a long shot.

The telecom giant says it has rolled out its so-called U-verse service in 11 cities. But that’s four fewer than promised, and the technology seems to remain mostly in the trial phase. AT&T executives acknowledge they aren’t fully marketing U-verse because the service can’t yet handle a surge of customers. AT&T counted just 3,000 customers at the end of the fourth quarter, unchanged from three months earlier.

Meanwhile, AT&T executives last month admitted for the first time that there were problems with the software for U-verse provided by Microsoft, its primary vendor on the project. That’s a concern not just for AT&T, but for telecom companies world-wide that bought Microsoft technology to run TV services using Internet protocol, or IP, to transmit signals.

It isn’t clear how serious the problems are because AT&T and Microsoft executives won’t discuss them. An AT&T spokesman attempted to play down the situation, calling it “a little fine tuning.” A Microsoft spokesman said the technology was “on track.”

But the delays plaguing U-verse have fed criticism that AT&T and Microsoft overreached, trying to get more out of Internet technology than it’s capable of delivering at this time. The skeptics include vendors, former employees and competitors. Surprisingly, one of the challenges they believe has tripped up AT&T is something the earliest TV sets could do easily: switch channels instantaneously.

Partnering with MS was a big mistake, and the technical approach is a big leap. Unlike Verizon, which runs fiber to the home with most of the channels in simultaneously moving in multicast streams, the U-verse system is video-on-demand over copper wire with a handful of channels to each home (like 4). So they need massive numbers of servers and with channel-changing at the central office. I wrote a patent application once for a rapid channel-changing system on a network like this, and I can tell you it’s a hard problem (though not an insoluble one, heh.) The basic problem is that you need to buffer up some data before you start displaying in order to have jitter protection, and the time it takes to fill that buffer causes delay in channel changing. MS demonstrated a fast channel-changing system at CES a year ago, but making something like that work on a real network is a very different problem from making it work in a demo.

The Internet is great for personalized programming, and not so great for huge amounts of bulk data. AT&T better get a better partner immediately and some better wires down the road if they’re ever going to get this thing to sing.

Google gets clue: Internet not fit for TV

Here’s a piece of earth-shaking news from the I told you so department:

AMSTERDAM (Reuters) – New Internet TV services such as Joost and YouTube may bring the global network to its knees, Internet companies said on Wednesday, adding they are already investing heavily just to keep data flowing.

Google, which acquired online video sharing site YouTube last year, said the Internet was not designed for TV.

It even issued a warning to companies that think they can start distributing mainstream TV shows and movies on a global scale at broadcast quality over the public Internet.

“The Web infrastructure, and even Google’s (infrastructure) doesn’t scale. It’s not going to offer the quality of service that consumers expect,” Vincent Dureau, Google’s head of TV technology, said at the Cable Europe Congress.

Google instead offered to work together with cable operators to combine its technology for searching for video and TV footage and its tailored advertising with the cable networks’ high-quality delivery of shows.

Duh. Regularly scheduled broadcast TV is fine for the Internet because we have a cute trick called multicast that allows many people to get a single stream, but the proliferation of any time, any show services like YouTube will bring the net to its knees. And that, boys and girls, is why you want Net Neutrality to die in the cradle.

The Internet, you see, is not a truck, it’s a series of tubes each of which has a limited capacity. And once they’re full, they’re full. And you have to wait. Ted Stevens was right all along, and it’s about time that Google got around to noticing.

Linklove Mark Goldberg.

UPDATE: AT&T is learning the same lesson the hard way.

Steve Jobs is posing

People, come on. When Steve Jobs says stuff like this:

The third alternative is to abolish DRMs entirely. Imagine a world where every online store sells DRM-free music encoded in open licensable formats. In such a world, any player can play music purchased from any store, and any store can sell music which is playable on all players. This is clearly the best alternative for consumers, and Apple would embrace it in a heartbeat. If the big four music companies would license Apple their music without the requirement that it be protected with a DRM, we would switch to selling only DRM-free music on our iTunes store. Every iPod ever made will play this DRM-free music.

he’s got his eye on your wallet. Google gets a free pass for putting Chinese dissidents in prison because they say “don’t be evil, wink wink.” Jobs sees how well the Good Guy thing works for them and he wants some of that action for Apple.

Watch what they do, not at what they say. Google is wrecking the Internet by piling on more regulation, and Jobs is running a music store, nothing more and nothing less.

Prof. Fast Eddie Felten, the voting machine hacker, nails it:

This is both a clever PR move and a proactive defense against European antitrust scrutiny. Mandatory licensing is a typical antitrust remedy in situations like this, so Apple wants to take licensing off the table as an option. Most of all, Apple wants to deflect the blame for the current situation onto the record companies. Steve Jobs is a genius at this sort of thing, and it looks like he will succeed again.

Pay attention to the man behind the curtain.

Accel getting serious?

This little move probably won’t garner a lot of attention, but I think it’s interesting:

Silicon Valley venture firm Accel Partners has hired mobile software expert Richard Wong as a partner, the latest sign of where investors think the action will be.

Wong spent six years at OpenWave, which developed early mobile browsers (WAP), and where Wong worked with mobile companies like Sorrent, Jamdat, Infospace and Motricity in their earliest stages and saw them grow quickly. He oversaw OpenWave’s marketing efforts, and more recently was head of its product division. (Here is his bio.)

Mobile wireless is a much more interesting world than the old-time Internet, and it’s not constrained by nutty interest groups peddling loony regulatory myths. It’s smart of Accel to get serious about it.

Doc Searls is a real man

Regarding my post on the attacks on Phil Kerpen’s Forbes article on net neutrality, Doc Searls does the right thing:

He’s right.

In an email yesterday, a friend complimented the post Richard corrected. Here’s what I wrote back: Look at it again. I’ve changed it a bit to make the logic work better. But I did it in a hurry. Not sure I didn’t lose something. Well, the problem wasn’t what I lost, but what I didn’t find in the first place, because I didn’t take the time look deep enough.

Blogging isn’t the main thing I do. It’s a side thing. I purposely spend as little time with it as I can, while still doing it. In this respect it isn’t journalism. Yet I’m still “supposed to be a journalist”.

That’s right too.

So there’s a corollary to “live and learn”. The longer you live, the more you re-learn.

That’s a hugely impressive and generous reaction and I admire Doc for being man enough to write it.

On the other side of the table, Mike Maslick and Broadband Karl refuse to cop to rash analysis. That tells me a lot. If there were more people in the world like Doc, we’d come to a happy resolution on hard issues like net neutrality a lot sooner. And you know what? That’s another thing that the Deloitte and Touche Telecom Report says, and the larger point of Doc’s post.

The hugely partisan, emotional debate over net neutrality that’s mostly about name-calling (Telco shill! Google bitch!) and fear-mongering isn’t helping anybody.

Let’s all take a step back, cool off, and look for common ground.

When Neuts Attack, Part n

Advocates of network neutrality are busily spreading a colorful story today. It begins with a piece in Forbes by Phil Kerpen of the Heartland Institute about the effects of threatened network neutrality legislation on investment in the Internet’s infrastructure. Kerpen discusses a study of telecom trends by Deloitte & Touche to the effect that the uncertain regulatory climate is bad for investment, and without new infrastructure the Internet will soon be in trouble.

For this, Kerpen is attacked by Paul Kapustka and Om Malik at GigaOm as a lying shill of the telcos:

Since Kerpen doesn’t actually link to the study, we are left to wonder what his conclusions are based on. It looks like DT doesn’t even believe there’s a problem, since another research paper there3 predicts that “unrelenting progress in processing power, network bandwidth and storage capacity” will let electronic games proliferate. What you’re seeing in Kerpen’s missive is another offering from the “telco chorus,” a group of bloviators who are paid either by conservative advocacy operations (like Kerpen’s Americans for Prosperity), or by groups indirectly supported by telco contributions.

Broadband Reports fires up this smokescreen:

Who’s to blame for this proclaimed bandwidth apocalypse? Network neutrality advocates, who are scaring off capacity investment, according to Phil Kerpen of Americans For Prosperity. Deloitte & Touche’s actual capacity prediction can be found here, but they make no mention of network neutrality law fears as the primary reason for the crunch — instead stating companies aren’t increasing capacity “because consumers will be unwilling to pay increased costs.”

Mike Maslick at Techdirt adds his own twist to Broadband Report’s fantasies:

It’s based on a Deloitte & Touche report, claiming that there hasn’t been enough backbone buildout to handle the growth in traffic — and the writer somehow connects this to network neutrality by saying it’s because of fear over network neutrality rules that the buildout isn’t happening. There’s just one problem, as Broadband Reports points out, the D&T report doesn’t mention network neutrality at all, and there’s no evidence to suggest that network neutrality has anything to do with backbone buildout.

The problem with these vicious and personal attacks (beside their evident rudeness) is that they’re completely off-base. The D & T Telecoms Predictions 2007 report has a whole section on network neutrality, ending with this remark:

Those who oppose creating [net neutrality] mandates argue that their business models are being undermined by Internet companies offering bandwidth-hungry services such as video and audio-streaming, heavily networked online games, video-based chat and peer-to-peer downloads. Many ISPs and telecommunications companies would like to start charging content companies, and others, a fee to provide access to their services. There are two primary reasons for this. The first is that ISPs and telecommunications carriers are seeing revenues stagnate. As penetration growth slows, competition drives down prices and rapidly rising Internet use among existing customers erodes margins. The second is that some of the largest Internet companies are enjoying bumper revenue growth and increasing profitability, and carriers would like to use their position in the value chain to participate in this growth.

Internet usage and traffic are both growing rapidly. There is an increasingly urgent need for new revenues that could fund expansion of the infrastructure on which the Internet runs. For example, on several key intercontinental routes, such as that between Asia and Europe, backbone capacity has grown slower than usage (see Figure 1), and may increasingly struggle to keep pace with demand. Similarly, ISPs and carriers may have to invest in higher capacity infrastructure to continue to be able to provide genuine broadband speeds to consumers and business users.

Balancing the two sides of [the network neutrality] debate is likely to remain challenging. Both sides have merit; both have their flaws. 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. (page 7, section titled The Network Neutrality Debate Needs Resolution.)

So whether you agree with Kerpen or not, it’s clear that his article is true to the Deloitte and Touche report’s summary of the issues, and the attacks by Kaputska, Malik, Broadband Reports, and Maslick are as wildly off base as they are vicious and personal.

UPDATE: Doc Searls jumps on the bandwagon right behind Broadband Report’s pseudonymous Karl:

As Karl notes at Broadband Reports, Deloitte & Touche’s actual capacity prediction can be found here, but they make no mention of network neutrality law fears as the primary reason for the crunch — instead stating companies aren’t increasing capacity “because consumers will be unwilling to pay increased costs.”

Like Karl, Doc didn’t bother reading the D & T report, he read a summary in a news article and drew wildly wrong conclusions from it. The bottom line here is simple: before calling somebody a liar, check your facts. Karl, Doc Searls, Mike Maslick, Paul Kapustka, and Om Malik couldn’t be bothered with that in this case, and they’re all supposed to be journalists.

UPDATE 2: See this post on the fallout from my criticism of Karl, et. al. Doc Searls posted an impressive retraction.