India’s sun is setting

Wired News reports on the Jobs Squeeze for Indian Workers:

U.S. companies such as IBM, Intel, Hewlett-Packard, Oracle and PeopleSoft are already exploring countries with even cheaper sources of technical labor, says a report from research firm IDC. The new destinations include Romania, Russia, Hungary, the Czech Republic, the Philippines, Singapore, Thailand and Vietnam.

Back in 1990, when I helped some members of an Indian religious cult set up a software company in South India, I predicted this would happen, just as it has in the Little Dragons and in Malaysia. A developing country can only attract business on the basis of cheap labor for so long until it’s choked on its own success and the cheap labor market moves elsewhere. Indians still have an advantage over other Asian countries because of widespread English usage among the educated class, but Indian culture is basically anti-capitalist and anti-Western, so they won’t be able to compete with New Europe for long unless they can deal with their BJP problem and the arrogance of their Brahmin caste.

Better than Linux

Is NetBSD better than Linux? Some people think so, which would be kind of funny for all the companies who’ve stalled new features for a year because they’ve been migrating products from VxWorks to Linux.

What do we mean by better? Here’s a clue:

While NetBSD uses the GNU toolchain (compiler, assembler, etc), and certain other GNU tools, the entire kernel and the core of the userland utilities are shipped under a BSD licence. This allows companies to develop products based on NetBSD without the requirement to make changes public (as with the GPL). While the NetBSD Project encourages companies and individuals to feed back changes to the tree, we respect their right to make that decision themselves

That’s a very big deal. It also emulates Linux and is extremely portable. See BSD forums.

Symbian OS, 3G spell doom

Dan Gillmor’s off-hand reference (“Palm frittered away its long lead, giving Microsoft and the Symbian alliance the time to catch up and in many ways surpass the pioneer”) sent me searching for info on Symbian, which turns out to be the OS of choice for mobile phones, especially those with 3G. Now there’s been a lot of wailing about the imminent demise of 3G thanks to the WiFi bubble, but early returns don’t support that thesis:

“M1 says its customers did not like the Wi-Fi service because it is not really mobile since users must stay within a coverage area 50-100 metres of the hotspot,” we learn. MobileOne will instead invest $150 million on 3G next year.

Beset as it is by technical problems, and suffering from dot.com-sized expectations, 3G has a compelling reason to roll into the market because it gives the operators fourfold efficiencies over the 2G digital networks. They can close off the old transmitters, and save themselves a lot of money. In the UK, the 3 network is branding itself by offering the cheapest calls of all.

No blog, or Pringle Can, can counter the harsh economics: public Wi-Fi doesn’t pay.

So it’s deeper and deeper into the doo for Palm.

UPDATE: Distinguished Valley Old Fart Tim Oren says it’s all over but the shouting.

FCC Rules

After watching the FCC ownership rules hearing on C-Span, and listening to as much of the commentary by folks like KKK alumni Fritz Hollings and Trent Lott as I could stand, I came away with the belief that the uproar over these rule changes is groundless.

Lawrence Lessig said: “The FCC will liberate the networks to consolidate because the FCC feels pressured by the courts” and some other stuff, but the rules expressly forbid mergers or takeovers between the Big Four TV networks, so that’s clearly hooey. The big changes were easing of the limit on local stations a network can own (which brought existing ownership into compliance) and relaxation of the rule prohibiting newspapers, TV, and radio from being owned by the same company in the same market. ClearChannel doesn’t gain by the rules, and may have to shed some stations.

So if the opposition to these rules isn’t rational – and at least some of it isn’t (Susie “Medea” Benjamin, trust fund activist, got herself arrested again at the hearing), then what’s it based on? A lot of folks were comfortable with the way things were in America when TV news came from the three networks plus CNN, the same stories with the same liberal/centrist spin. Then along came Rupert Murdoch and we got the Fox News Channel, the New York Post, and the Fox Network, and the traditional liberal agenda got some competition. Fox isn’t always, or perhaps even often right, but it is a counterbalance and a different point of view.

The opponents of the rule change are scared that people like Murdoch will alter the media landscape at the level of local print news and broadcast news, an area still controlled by the liberal oligarchy. I hope they’re right, because I’d like to have a TV channel or a daily paper in the Frisco Bay Area with a centrist or right-wing orientation, and it certainly appears that we’d never get one under the old rules.

I don’t believe for a minute that opponents to these ownership rules from the left care about diversity of opinion, which is sure to be enhanced by allowing Murdoch to buy more media properties in more markets. More power to him.

The Bubble that Wasn’t

A recent comment of mine that WiFi chipsets aren’t a good bet for investors raised a few eyebrows, but facts are facts. See The Register for the lowdown on current pricing trends for WiFi chips:

The price war is being driven by the entry of new chip makers, primarily in Taiwan. Acer Labs and SiS have begun sampling 802.11b chipsets, while VIA’s networking chip subsidiary will put its own product into mass production in July. Almost all of the newcomers are looking to compete on price. The established players are being forced to do the same.

The need to maintain sales once faster, compatible and at last genuinely standard 802.11g parts come on stream is likely to keep prices down. TechKnowledge reckons 802.11g chips will hit an average $9.68 by the end of the year, just over half the $18 they commanded last year.

Countering the price decline is the fact that many 802.11b chipset vendors buy third-party radio transceivers to connect to their own MAC chips – the parts that handle the network protocols. A limited number of RF chip makers is keeping prices more stable, but again, a number of Taiwanese vendors are believed to be getting reading to enter that market and will drive down the price of RF chips and thus the cost of 802.11b chipsets as a whole.

You generally find opportunity to innovate in the production of IEEE standards only at the system interface and on the analog side, and sometimes with power management, but even those areas are effectively overmined.

WiFi Bubble

Business Week online has an interesting article about over-hyped WiFi:

A year ago, Sean Marzola was the CEO of one of Silicon Valley’s hottest Wi-Fi startups. Embedded Wireless Devices in Pleasanton, Calif., had set out to design chips for Wi-Fi (wireless fidelity) access points — “hot spots” — that permit wireless Internet access within a radius of 300 feet. But about 18 weeks before EWD’s first product could start being manufactured, investors pulled the plug. Last August, EWD quietly closed its doors, leaving Marzola an entrepreneur without a home.

Note to venture capitalists: If you’re funding WiFi chips, you’ve been had. Intel, Broadcom, TI, Intersil, and Samsung will own this market, not foundry-less startups. You’ve been warned.

Wireless switch standards war

It’s already received wisdom that the right way to build an enterprise WiFi network is with a small number of smart switches and a large number of dumb (and cheap) access points that do little more than act as remote radios for the switch. Symbol pioneered the concept, and now everybody else (especially switch and router companies like Cisco, Extreme, and Juniper,) has climbed on board. Is the industry ready to standardize a management protocol for dumb access points? These folks say yes:

Engineers from Airespace, Cisco Systems Inc. (Nasdaq: CSCO – message board), and NTT DoCoMo Inc. (NYSE: DCM – message board) have presented the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) with a memo proposing a standard protocol for controlling 802.11 “lightweight” or “thin” access points via a wireless LAN switch.

Following the trend towards wireless LAN switching that is happening in the industry, the authors are proposing a “standardized, interoperable” lightweight access point protocol (LWAPP) that can “radically simplify the deployment and management of wireless networks.”

But others, like Trapeze, the Extreme spin-off in Pleasanton funded by kiss-of-death VC Accel Partners, think not:

Like most draft standards, this one already has its critics. Trapeze Networks Inc., for example, questions the need to develop a lightweight protocol at all. “If you architect your system correctly? then why do you need it?” asks George Prodan, senior VP of worldwide marketing at Trapeze.

Prediction (worth what you paid for it): Cisco, Airespace, and NTT will win, Trapeze and Accel will lose, and this isn’t the end of wireless engineering, by a long shot. Airespace’s Systems Enginnering director, Bob O’Hara, has been a long-time leader in the 802.11 standards process, from the early days when Greg Ennis and Phil Belanger presented the DFWMAC amalgam of wireless protocols (including my Plink II) to the committee for approval, so this would be slam-dunk in that arena. He doesn’t have that kind of weight in the highly-political IETF, but Cisco does, and the idea has the added benefit of actually making sense, which still counts for something these days.

UN talks Internet to villages; electricity can wait

The UN is going to hold a meeting to talk about wireless networking in the Third World, with help from The Wireless Internet Institute:

On June 26 , 2003, the Wireless Internet Institute will join forces with the United Nations Information and Communication Technologies Task Force to host “The WiFi Opportunity for Developing Nations” at UN Headquarters in New York City. The conference will create the conditions for informal dialogue and brainstorming among industry practitioners, government representatives and international development experts. It will feature plenary sessions and structured brainstorming workshops to establish strategies to overcome obstacles as well as develop environments favorable to the broad deployment of WiFi infrastructures. Conference conclusions will serve as a blueprint for national consensus-building programs, spectrum-policy reform and infrastructure deployment.

Maybe now that Hans Blix is out of a job, he can inspect Third World nations for strategies to overcome obstacles to Internet connectivity, like, um, no computers and stuff. At least that’ll keep him out of real trouble.

Don’t get me wrong here, I’m trashing the UN, not WiFi. I love WiFi, and not just because I invented most of its MAC protocol for Photonics back in 1992 (beacons, segmentation, RTS/CTS, and addressing). WiFi is a great solution to the “last 100 feet” problem, but it’s not a backbone or wide-area mesh solution, because: a) there aren’t enough channels in the 801.11b spectrum for that, and b) 802.11a doesn’t go far enough. So we need some better solutions to the infrastructure problem than 802.11, and we even need better solutions to the “last 100 feet” than the standard allows. As originally designed, the MAC supported the kinds of Quality of Service mechanisms needed for telephony, but the trio that shoehorned the standard dropped this feature, and now we’ve got a mess on our hands.

So 802.11 is nice, but it’s time to go to the second generation before we get too hog-wild about implementing it everywhere. And you already knew that anything the UN’s up to these days is likely to be crap.

And just incidentally, if there’s no such thing as RF interference (as David Reed and David Weinberger claim), then why should the FCC free up more channels for WiFi?

Silicon Valley and the war

Does Silicon Valley have a split personality in the war? The Frisco Chronicle thinks we do, because we produce high-tech weaponry but harbor a boatload of anti-war sentiment. Wind River’s president Jerry Fiddler’s not confused:

“This war is a catalyst that is shining light on a military that is always strong and present and here for one reason — to keep us safe,” he said in an e-mail. “The world today is a safer place because of American military capabilities. We’ve seen those capabilities used to end conflict recently in Kosovo, Bosnia, Rwanda and elsewhere. We owe a debt to our soldiers.”

And neither was former deputy secretary of defense David Packard.

But others are: Bob Taylor, ex- of Xerox PARC, Lee Felsenstein, once a personal computer pioneer of sorts, and a number of the elf bloggers, like Marc Canter, David Weinberger, Howard Rheingold, Lisa Rein, Meg Hourihan, Steve Kirsch, Joi Ito, et. al. Generally, the techies who oppose the war — and implicitly support a status quo that leaves Saddam Hussein in power — are not engineers, but “social implications of technology” people, self-appointed visionaries, dot-commers, and marketeers. The reality-based thinking that engineers practice doesn’t leave room for coddling dictators and sanctioning torture, so we want regime change. Besides, many of us have worked for managers who remind us of the Butcher of Baghdad, so we naturally sympathize with the oppressed.

Hollywood’s a different story, of course, because it’s full of the fuzzy-minded, who tend to have the same tunnel-vision we find in the Valley’s paratechnicals.