Category: Computers

Reuters reports that Asian telco now offer pay TV services:

HONG KONG (Reuters) – Asian phone companies are rolling out new pay TV services using their broadband Internet networks, injecting fresh competition into an industry dominated by cable and satellite operators.

The trend has taken off in Asia first because the technology is already in place: three-quarters of the region’s broadband connections use digital subscriber line (DSL) technology to transform ordinary telephone lines into high-speed data pipes, industry analysts say.

Modifying existing DSL systems to handle pay TV is a relatively minor expense for most Internet companies as they look for new ways to make money, said Marcel Fenez, an Asia media consultant at PricewaterhouseCoopers.

There are a couple of issues here, penetration and bandwidth. Japan and Hong Kong offer higher-speed DSL than we’re used to in America, and more people are hooked up. There must be some subsidies at work, but I don’t have the details on them.

Link via Broadbandits author Om Malik.

Google has web site for their new toys, some of which are pretty neat. Try Google Viewer to have the results of a search played out for you. It’s like the “scan” button on a car radio.

On one of my many trips to Fry’s this weekend, I ran into an old buddy from 3Com who now works for Wi-Fi champion Atheros, and we quickly ran down 802.11, 802.15, 802.16, UWB, Intel’s wireless strategy, and the limitations of IPv6. Little chance encounters like that are what’s best about Silicon Valley, but on reflection I didn’t learn much from it except that it’s nice that I don’t have to write code for a living any more.

Om Malik’s book on the bubble, Broadbandits, sounds moderately interesting:

WorldCom in bankrupt, Global Crossing is decimated, PSINet sold for peanuts, and Genuity sold its assets for a mere $250 million, a fraction of its one-time worth. With over 100 companies bankrupt and equal number that have shut shop, as many as 600, 000 telecommunications workers are now without a paycheck, these are staggering numbers for an industry that accounts for a sixth of the U.S. economy. But they are not as staggering as the amounts of money that hard-working employees at these broadband companies have lost.

As executives were cashing out on their own holdings, they encouraged employees to put their 401(k) dollars into company stock. The telecom industry is perhaps the worst culprit in the spate of financial dirty dealings that have been splashed across the business pages and yet the rewards reaped by the top executives at many of these failed, or failing, companies have been inversely proportionate to their decline.

Can somebody who’s read it comment on whether it’s worth the time?

Jeff Chester of the Center for Digital Democracy and Steven Rosenfeld of TomPaine.com are worried that capitalism is Stealing The Internet:

The Internet’s early promise as a medium where text, audio, video and data can be freely exchanged and the public interest can be served is increasingly being relegated to history’s dustbin. Today, the part of the Net that is public and accessible is shrinking, while the part of the Net tied to round-the-clock billing is poised to grow exponentially.

I’m going to have to hurry up and publish my critique of “The Future of Ideas” because this kind of crap gets more and more common. For the record, and because I don’t have much time today, let me remind my readers that the Internet, at the time TCP/IP was rolled-out in 1982, consisted of a half-dozen computers connected by 56Kbps modems on leased liines, and nobody was exchanging any video or audio over it. It’s become what it is today because capitalist enterprises were willing to invest money in upgrading the infrastructure, which they did on the expectation that they could make some money off it. It already costs more to get a broadband connection than a dialup, and that’s as it should be. As we go to more metered services, the richness of the overall environment will improve, not decline.

So no, the socialist vision of the Internet as something as free as air has never been true, the Internet is not dying, and we don’t need more government regulation of the Net, thank you very much.

I wish these dudes would go and find themselves an issue they can understand.

Rob Flickenger, a sysadmin for O’Reilly who doesn’t make his living writing code, thought he caught Linksys shirking the GPL, except he didn’t:

As far as I can tell without having exhaustively looked at every piece of available code, Linksys appears to be trying to comply with the terms of the GPL (as I understand them anyway), and putting many customizations into BSD code, which doesn’t require source distribution.

This is really disappointing to Mr. Flickenger, because he so wanted to stomp one of them capitalist enterprises that was dumb enough to use GPL’ed code.

There’s an interesting remark from Brett Glass in the Flickenger’s comments section, to wit:

This whole affair demonstrates the true nature of the GPL. It’s designed to sabotage businesses. In particular, it’s intended to strip them of the ability to add unique value to their products — which, in turn, is an essential element of success. VA Linux had to drop out of the hardware business because they couldn’t get a competitive edge — which happened, in turn, because they embraced GPLed code. Linksys, if the GPL zealots have their way, will go the same route.

Linksys was foolish indeed to use GPLed code at all. Instead, they should have used BSD-licensed code, which is friendly to programmers and to the businesses which issue their paychecks. The BSD and MIT licenses, as well as other truly free licenses, promote innovation and allow programmers to be rewarded for innovating. The viral, spiteful, anti-business, anti-programmer GPL does the opposite.

Is GPL “viral and spiteful”? Clearly, there’s a lot of spite on Flickenger’s part, but that’s just a personal issue, not a legal one. I don’t think there’s anything wrong with using GPL’ed code, as long as you don’t actually need to modify it. For everything important, there’s the BSD license.

The House Energy and Commerce committee is holding hearings today on broadband regulation aimed at harmonizing DSL and cable access policies:

While these two forms of broadband directly compete in many cities, they are currently regulated in different ways. Phone companies are required to provide Internet service providers non-discriminatory access to their networks, while cable companies can pick and choose among ISPs.

There is an urban legend that these regulations have something to do with a nefarious plot by the cablecos and telcos to highjack Google results and steer customers to the provider’s preferred sites. This is not true, of course, and the issue is under what conditions independent ISPs can use DSL and cable plants to reach new customers.

Independent ISPs, of course, want to be able to serve customers across the cable company’s lines for a minimal price, but cable companies want to be able to continue dictating terms of such access as they see fit. Telcos would like the same degree of flexibility in their business models that cable companies have.

The public has two interests here, and they don’t necessarily harmonize all that well. On the one hand, we want the choice between DSL and cable Internet to as many homes as possible, which is to say, all of them. We want these services to continue improving over time, which would require the companies to buy more gear from Cisco and friends. And we want the prices low.

At the same time, we want to be able to use ISPs that are more competent and less restrictive than SBC and Comcast, and we want to be able to do that for a reasonable price.

So if we set public policy that cablecos and telcos are only allowed to sell use of their lines for basic packet switching, and that all ISP functions (assigning IP addresses, handling e-mail and Usenet, and providing DNS) have to be unbundled, their profit margin may not be enough to encourage them to buy lots of gear.

On the other hand, how much does it take?

This is cute:

TiVo Inc. subscribers will be able to program their digital video recorders remotely by logging on to America Online under a new service TiVo and AOL plan to announce today.

One of the coolest things about Replay is the ability it gives its customers to program recording lists on the web, so it’s nice to see TiVo catching-up, and it’s also smart of them to cultivate their AOL connection:

So maybe what AOL/Time-Warner needs to do is forget about the Internet and broadband, and get themselves some nice Tivo-type property to really make the synergy work. Then they can upgrade the book value of their “good will” instead of sending out bad vibes and like, bumming everybody out, you know.

…as somebody said.

Joe Lieberman has a moderately interesting paper on his web site called Growing the Innovation Economy: A New Strategy For A New Prosperity that deals with Internet openness in broad terms:

Ensure that the Internet continues to provide an open platform for innovation: The Internet is different from the phone network and radio and broadcast television in important ways. It is easier for individuals and small organizations to be producers as well as consumers of information. The Internet allows for “many to many” communication as opposed to the “one to many” communication of broadcast television. Innovation can occur at the edge of the network. A student, an independent software developer, or a small high-tech company can come up with an idea for a new application, protocol, or kind of content. If enough people find it useful or worthwhile, this idea can spread like wildfire. Even as the Internet evolves, it important to ensure that it continues to provide an open platform for rapid and decentralized innovation, and for the exchange of ideas.

It seems sensible enough, praising the Internet, entrepreneurship, and openness, and there’s nothing to which I would take exception in any of it.

Unfortunately, the tortuously confused Larry Lessig posted this excerpt to his blog, somehow managing to read it as an endorsement of the dubious “end-to-end” architecture that’s spawned a whole cargo cult of misguided followers:

End to End has gone presidential.

So now I’m getting email from people wanting me to comment on Lessig’s reasoning in his book The Future of Ideas. I haven’t read Lessig’s tome, and I doubt I will unless somebody pays me to review it, but I nonetheless tried to accommodate my correspondent by posting this explanation:

I don?t doubt that Lessig means well, but he frankly doesn?t know what he?s talking about. There is a legitimate, if obscure, fear in some quarters that ISPs may someday censor specific types of content, either in their customer?s interest or in their own economic interests. Porn filters, for example, discriminate based on content, but many customers would consider this a value-added service and it?s not worth getting excited about.

But let?s take it a step further, and suppose that an ISP filters video packets, ostensibly because it wants to control your video experience through its ownership of your cable TV franchise. This would be a bad thing, of course, and I don?t argue otherwise.

But the question we have to ask as network architects is whether there?s any relationship between the Internet?s present or future architecture and this sort of censorship, and the answer to that is clearly no. Video packets are easy to identify on the net because they?re carried by a limited set of protocols and clearly marked; a censor doesn?t care whether the marking is at the IP layer or at the RTP layer or at the UDP layer; they each have a signature, and unless they?re encrypted, they can be found.

Now the question has to be asked as to whether the Internet?s current architecture can hope to compete with cable TV and DBS as a practical alternative for carrying audio and video data, and whether this should be a goal. In the early days of IP, it clearly wasn?t a goal and therefore an architecture was developed that blocked transport layer access to the isochronous services in the data link and medium access control protocols that would make it practical. This architecture now has the effect of keeping the voice and data networks separate, to the advantage of telcos and cablecos who would like to bill you extra for providing voice and video services.

So far from advocating an architecture that frees the consumer from the big media and telephone companies, the end-to-end cargo cultists are promoting the exact thing that keeps them dependent, and they do so out of ignorance of the technical issues in network architecture.

To put it simply, you wouldn?t trust me to explain constitutional law to you, so why would you trust someone with Lessig?s background to explain my business, network architecture, to you?

If you want a robust Internet that’s capable of carrying voice and video as well as data, you have to abandon end-to-end architecture and go with a smarter network layer; this doesn’t mean you have to abandon openness, because openness and end-to-end aren’t related.

OK?