Rich Miner

Google Android. Group manager mobile products. Open handset alliance of 34 partners to help build Android, an open handset platform, based on Linux and write programs. Also third party dev environment, along with $10m competition to award prizes to best applications built for that environment.

Mobiles – smartphones – have power of a desktop PC in 2002. Mobiles fall far short of the things we were doing on 2002 in terms of ability to connect and delivery communications and multimedia experiences. Huge gap between what the hardware can do and what the software delivers. Mobile ecosystem is very closed, in terms of platforms which are closed, and even the ‘open’ OSs are closed, like Symbian or Mobile Windows. Called open because it has APIs, but if you’re trying to create applications then it’s not open. Level of control these platforms maintains prevents carriers, individuals and others form innovating.

There’s typically an arcane process between developers and the users of the applications, so huge hurdles that the dev has to get through to get his app to consumers. If you’re a software dev and you realise that your destiny is controlled by onerous testing requirements of the platform owners. Same with content.

If you want to distribute video of a cat playing with yarn, you can do that online. You can be votes best video, and you can rise to the top. In mobile industry, there are walls that prevent people making stuff available.

Google knows that mobile is important. Many mobiles are people’s only computer, they may never own a laptop or desktop. Problem with existing platform is that the process of developing and distributing apps is too onerous. So building own platform, Android, which will open the mobile space and will provide significantly more innovation.

Built it so that there’s a large ecosystem, brought a large group of people together to open source the platform. There are other open platform initiatives, but realised that none of them were unifying everything, or providing everything you’d one for a complete phone. Google’s invested significant resources.

This isn’t about a single GooglePhone, but about an entire range of phones, it’s not to hold up a phone to the iPhone, but it’s a platform that hopefully the manufacturers will build phones on. People also want to build on top of the Android platform. Goal is to break down these closed platforms, and that you enable a more open handset ecosystem.

This will allow people to put applications out there and people will be able to choose what they want, and rate how good they are. Want more innovation.

If you look at what Linux delivers, but to say you’re going to take Linux and build a mobile consumer device isn’t the right way to do it. Linux isn’t really even a consumer computing OS yet. Need to put a bunch of dedicated software layers on top of Linux to do that. Linux is a lower level, but want high-speed 2D/3D graphics, tools for Java apps, all the layers of software you need on top of Linux. This software’s either written by Google or written by experts in the community.

Our goal is not to inhibit innovation, so using Apache 2.0 software licence, so that brands can build software and not have to open source it. Don’t want to put them off.

Android is still under dev, but handsets will ship second half of this year, and then the software will be open sourced. So it’s not being developed as an open source project, but is going to be made available when handsets are.

Carriers look at Google as competitive, working with them to get them to understand that they can make them lots of money as a partner, and are not competitors. Carriers can take the OEM and brand it, do whatever they like with it, can build a tightly branded handset. Can even build locked phones on it, and that’s ok.

But since announcing Android, the message of openness is resonating in the industry. There are media battles to be seen as more open. And once consumers understand what being open means, they won’t accept it when that’s taken away. They will value openness over closedness. Google happy that message of openness is so well received.

Michael Calebrese
Debate of consumer’s rights to run whatever they want on wireless. Open access to the airwaves needed. 700 mhz spectrum auction just finished. More spectrum means more competition? No, oligarchy. No new entrants. DSL duopoly got exclusive rights to >90% of the spectrum, and got the best bits too.

Licences can be conditioned by gov’t. Propose conditions that might guarantee new entrants, so that new ISPs etc. could get good quality bandwidth. FCC adopted more limited open access condition. Verizon fought conditions, and then announced open development, thus qualifying to take valuable chunk of network.

Larger point is that general public won’t have an alternative to the carriers unless we have more open spectrum. Need to go back to early days of Hoover, in early 1920s, before he imposed licensing for CBS and RDA, before the radio act, most small radio stations were sponsored by local groups and they tried to share the airwaves. But interference caused regulation.

Exclusive licensing and auctions has resulted in capacity being wasted. Auctions assume we have scarcity. But what’s scares is government licences, not spectrum. 95& of spectrum is not being used at any given time.

If we want open wireless, we need open spectrum. smart radio tech, cognitive radios, could utilise underused spectrum. 49 channels are reserved for TV, even though 7 are used in any local market. Even after the digital TV transition, there will still be a lot unused.

But access to TV whitespace is a starting point. Concept of whitespace needs to be broader. Much more wasted capacity wasted in bands that are licensed to governmental bodies, such as forestry or military. Military are much more open to sharing, because they know that they can use whitespace to sniff out spare spectrum anywhere in the world.

Soon, edge devices will be able to share any unused capacity. Need to think beyond passive sensing tech, particularly when looking at gov’t bands. Last world radio congress, asked for study about how beacons to broadcast data about spectrum environment to make it easier for devices to grab unused spectrum quickly and efficiently.

As TV whitespace becomes available, cost of spectrum becomes no longer a barrier to entry. Will also provide rocket fuel for community wireless networks, such as mesh wireless.

Although we initiated this debate, what will be critical will be degree of open spectrum.

Richard Whitt
Google This is a really important proceeding at the FCC right now, unique opportunity, supporting the tech and public, to create momentum for public use of unlicensed spectrum. Lots of spectrum. Taking on entrenched incumbent, broadcasters,m who don’t want to see anyone come into “their space” and utilise these spectrum band. Lots of misinformation, but they are a powerful and pervasive presence.

Another camp entered, the wireless carriers, CTIA, including T-Mobile and Sprint. Third front is the wireless microphone chaps, who think there will be interference problems.

Testing phase for devices from people like Microsoft and Philips, but test devices not functioning properly. Most recent tests shut down, so whilst that’s really supposed to prove the concept, but the opponents are ;seizing on that as proof that it can’t work. Battle of scientific fact, but also it’s a PR battle, and a political battle. Like to think that the good guys can wine, but if you can get involved, send and email, send letter, write to your representatives, got to the FCC. This has to be a grassroots effort, not just a top down. If you think this is the right cause we need to pull together. Need to make whitespace something everyone can use.

Brett Glass
Runs a wireless ISP in Wyoming. Founded Lariat, wireless broadband ISP, and did it because he had to. Wanted to live in the countryside, and university was the only thing in Wyoming that had decent connection to the internet.

Got together with businesses, pooled money, got a T1 line. World’s first wireless broadband provider. Started as a non-profit, and were besieged by members to take it private because they wanted to have investment. Wanted someone else to take care of their ISP needs. Now a rapidly growing ISP. Serving areas unlicensed by other service provided. Mount a radio on the roof. Cable won’t go to these places, neither will ISPs. But they will.

Fibre isn’t economical, it’s got to be wireless. Why aren’t indie wireless ISPs more well known? Reasons not growing so fast – upstream issues. prices are increasing for any small carrier to do business with the backbone operators. Backbone operators turning into local monopolies, which won’t co-operate. Triple price of the bandwidth, which triples price to customers.

If gov’t wanted to do something, it would be to require the backbones to open up in smaller locations.

Also problems with wireless spectrum auctions. Insufficient granularity – have to buy half a state not a county. Timing issues. Big upfront payments. Prevent new entrants, prevent small carriers getting in there.

Net neutrality stuff could also make them not competitive anymore.

And P2P concerns. Why is it that Comcast are suddenly throttling back P2P. Can get a file either from the client server, goes to ISP, then to local loop to user. ISP backbone connections are pretty expensive, but have to pay it to get content to the customer.

P2P clients start using bandwidth from ISPs, which is more expensive than it would be if the content was sat on a colo somewhere.

Does restricting P2P limit free speech? But any content or service you can get through P2P you don’t have to get through P2P, could provide it another way that doesn’t hit small ISPs.

In Japan, increased bandwidth available to the home. P2P grew to be more than 70% of traffic. Adding capacity doesn’t solve the problem, because it will just fill up. Need to manage network and make it more efficient.

Glen Strachan
Has worked in Romania and Uganda, connecting schools with funding from US Aid. Macedonia, wanted to provide internet to all schools in the country. Went to Macedonia, found that broadband were minimal, only available in major city. 120k account counted as ‘broadband’. 2mb for €10,000.

Not enough to provide connectivity to schools, but also need to think about regulatory environment. Monopoly part-owned by government. Opened up market using schools as anchor. US gov’t paid to go to run open competition for an ISP, could only use a wireless ISP. No money could be spent on a monopoly so had to be wireless.

Market opened in Jan. Four vendors bid, winning vendor and signed a contract. paide them $2.5m for connectivity, just bought services, not equipment. They built out their own network, and had to put up same amount of money. Incentive money only for rural areas. Network had to be built between April til September when Schools opened. Was up by August. Covered all schools.

Goal was to create a competitive atmosphere that would reduce the prices so schools could afford it. Internet penetration was 4%, now is 34% three years later.

Macedonian gov’t has purchase 180k computers for schools. Price for connectivity is €10 for 9gb, €25 for unlimited.

Now doing same thing for Montenegro. Smaller country. Finished up in Montenegro. Working on Senegal, who want to use the Macedonia Connects model, but Senegal has no regulatory reform so will play a vital part. Also lots of corruption in Montenegro so reform was required there.

US Aid has allowed the creation of a model that can be replicated in developing countries.

[Again, brain too slow to deal with the questions. Sorry. Heath Row is taking fab notes too, rivalling me for speed and verbatim transcription. He’s also got the open fibre session notes that I missed. I should find him and say hello just to compare notes on taking notes.]

Technorati Tags: F2C2008

Brad Templeton, from EFF.

Involved with EFF and Bit Torrent Corporation, but not speaking officially on behalf of that.

Most people here strongly in favour of open networks. P2P is what the internet is, end to end is where it’s at.

Real invention of the internet was not packet switching or email. Not a technological invention. It was the pricing model, which is that i pay for my line to the middle, and you pay for yours, and we don’t worry about the bits in between.

There were other networks, but the internet was the one that worked. It enabled a bunch of applications because it stopped requiring that every application be financially justified. The early networks were in the hands of corporations’ bean counters, which would stifle innovation.

If there had been packet bills for pictures of fish tanks, as per early internet uses, and there’d be no way to justify that. We’d have had a network of timid users; people have a psychological cost to paying money as well as a financial. Even if the amounts are small. But great stuff came from en environment where pricing model not damaging.

Monster in the closet. Everybody oversells their internet capacity, offering unlimited internet or a pipe that’s bigger than they can supply. The expect you not to use your allowance.

Got into a debate of ‘whose pipe is it’? Dissonance between what the customers think they are buying and what vendors think they are selling. DSL, upstream component often unused. That got exploited by P2P, finding a network resource that was unused was a valuable thing in some cases. But getting battles over that.

P2P is clearly the best tech for publishing a file cheaply, so not surprising that copyright violators use it, although that’s not inherent in the technology.

Something new will always be a bandwidth hog, there’s always going to be things that use more bandwidth than others. Worried that the backlash against P2P is that you end up beating down the winner, the most effective tool. If you got rid of P2P, something else would come along.

Law to protect network neutrality is hard to write effectively. All telecom regulation principles have caused more harm than good. They started with good intention in many cases, but before long they did something bad.

One thing they do bad is that as soon as you have a regulation in place, no matter how wonderful it is, simply having paperwork generates a barrier. E.g. export restrictions on encryption methods. Having to do the paperwork make companies take the encryption out of their products. So worried about that.

Like putting out a fire with corn-based ethanol – costs more in energy to make than you get out of it. But because of clever regulation people are going down this route and it’s all a lie.

Universal service, long ago, maybe helped. Today rural wireless can be delivered for less than urban landlines.

Once put a telephone box in the middle of Burning Man. Easy to do now, can bring telephony now to rural areas.

E911 is a case in point, if you want help in an emergency then you have to pay $1 per month per user. This regulation strangles innovation in telephony.

CALEA, regulation that allows the gov’t to wiretap. Companies don’t know if they have to comply. Has cost $500m, but no idea if it’s caught anyone at all. Companies who put this capability into equipment then sell it on to other countries, so giving them built-in surveillance.

2006; 13 digital wiretaps, 1714 of all types, convictions about 1.8x. Very expensive, hardly caught anyone.

Spectrum Allocation, started as a good idea, now is very stupid. Most spectrum not used effectively. Fights over whitespace. Firms bit $50 billion for monopolies. What did we learn from 802.11?

Replace FCC with three words: Don’t be selfish.

One regulation that’s so far been successful is the one EFF are suing AT&T with. Wiretaps – phone companies allowed NSA to put in taps on all traffic without warrants, so one good law told them not to do it, but they ignored it when the White House asked. President tried to get the law nullified, but the Senate said no.

Where is the answer?
– be careful what policies you have
– review all policies after a few years
– default is that they expire
– more bandwidth and competition
– it’s the monopoly, stupid

In many cases, we’ve created these monopolies. 100 years ago perhaps they made sense as a monopoly, but now they don’t. Some say that cable companies are not monopolies, you can move company just by moving your house.

If we can get in the dark fibre, get in the competition. Fibre is going to deliver what we need. Need to let people build from the bottom up. People say the internet can’t scale for video, but that’s wrong. There’s enough bandwidth out there. But P2P really does scale up, especially now there are things being done, part of the Comcast agreement with Bit Torrent, will cause more local peer detection, and it’s the creation of local caches of data from a ground-up tech which is very exciting.

[Note: I have a hideous cold, which is making concentrating very difficult. I know I’ve missed bits out – apologies.]

Technorati Tags: F2C2008

So I’m here in Washington DC at David Isenberg’s Freedom to Connect conference. It’s a very different crowd to the one I usually run in, so it should be really interesting.

David Isenberg
Over the next two days we’re going to expand the discussion. Our planet is in danger of becoming hostile to life; not just about rising tides and flooding, but the carbon in the atmosphere could extinguish life on earth. So I believe that we can use the internet to conserve more atmospheric carbon than its infrastructure generates. And we can use the internet for global participation that transcends tribalism to end war.

This is a remarkable group from all around the world. We are innovators and activists, academics, investors, lawyers regulators, builders of networks, and somewhere in here there’s also a man of the cloth. Among us is or will soon be a son who brought his father, and a mother who brought her daughter. This is how it should be, because saving the internet should be a family affair.

Some of us are here because they don’t believe that the internet needs saving, or if it does, it needs saving from people like me. I welcome those who would be the minority view in the room, because too often we only talk to our friends. I’m under no illusions that minds will be changed, but hopefully a mutual understanding can be reached.

The story we’ll tell in the next two days is one of companies under the disruptive power of the internet, it’s a story we all wrote in one way or another, in blog or C or in cheque books or in wrinkles on our hands and faces. It’s a story we won’t find in the mainstream media because that would be the story of the media’s own impending destruction.

It’s the story of one telephone company that i worked for and loved and hated and tried to save, called AT&T. That AT&T doesn’t exist anymore. AT&T shaped me and made me who I am today, I’m half Bell-head and half net-head. AT&T had other Davids too, people who invented photovoltaics, the transistor, C, UNIX, DSL and the cable modem. It’s also a story of managers who didn’t understand technology so they sent consultants to Bell Labs rather than go themselves and display their own ignorance.

The corporate culture was so deeply rooted that their culture was unquestionable. Managers had to rise through 18 levels of management in 20 years. It’s the story of an executive who drove AT&T”s computer business to failure and kept getting promoted. It’s the story of failed businesses and partnerships and a cell-phone division that would have failed if the mothership hadn’t been so big.

It’s the story of competitors created by a President’s pen stroke, that were destroyed a few years later by the courts. It’s the story that competition would replace regulation, and that competition destroyed.

It’s the story of people struggling to be free. When every record label rejects DRM, or a third of all iPhones are unlocked this is a victory. Neo-econs say these are responses to market forces, but they are not, they are victories, our victories. The struggle to keep the net free is like the struggle to work a 40 hour week, or to end wars. If we want a free internet we need to take it and build it.

The story we’ll tell is the future of the internet. We are writing it, but we do not know how it will end.

[Holds up a bit of fibre cable.]

Three fibres can carry the entire US conventional telephony and have room left over. If every one of the 6.5 billion people had a telephone, and at the same moment they were all making a call, and all that traffic could be routed through this cable, a hundred fibres would still be dark. If this cable was coming down your street, if your house could have ten of these fibres coming into your house…

The problem we’ve been discussing, that Comcast, and net neutrality folks have been having has been completely miscast. We’ve been talking about how we manage scarcity, but we should be talking about how we create abundance.

But all this takes energy. Computing takes the same power as the entire airline industry, so we need to reduce the energy we use. We can do better, we can use the Internet to reduce travel, and manage energy, and we’ll talk about that on Tuesday.

how will the internet story end? Will a few of the smartest telephone companies, like BT or Verizon, who have the wisdom, foresight, courage and money to sponsor Freedom to Connect evolve to be the connectors of tomorrow? Or will the telcos create the internet in the image of Clear Channel, locking it down, ghettoising it? Or will they make it so invasive that no one creative of innovative goes there anymore. Or maybe new forms of organisation, Benkler-style, arise to build and operate a new infrastructure we must have.

Or will other countries show the way? Assuming that the US is capable of seeing what they put in front of us?

In any case, welcome to Freedom to Connect.

Technorati Tags: F2C2008

Being a freelance consultant isn’t the easiest thing in the world to do. It’s not necessarily the consulting itself that’s difficult, it’s all the stuff that goes along with it – finding leads, closing deals, deciding prices, dealing with recalcitrant clients.

I’ve been a freelance of one stripe or another for ten years now. I started off as a freelance music journalist writing for the Melody Maker, a career move that lasted not even two years. I was rubbish at getting work, had no real confidence in my own abilities, and was intimidated by many of the editors and PR types I had to butter up to get a commission. (Oddly, I was rarely, if ever, intimidated by the bands I worked with. They were mostly lovely.)

Equally, I struggled awfully as a web designer, lucking out with a good contract just nine months before the dot.com crash, and then spending the next nine months searching for a new contract, along with every other out-of-work web person around at the time.

It’s only since I moved into blog consulting – a scary four years ago – that I really found my peer group and learnt how to do all those things that need to be done to make any consultancy a success. And it’s been my peers that have helped keep me sane, provided me with a way to sanity check my ideas, and give me really vital feedback on whether or not I was barking up the wrong tree.

There are books out there to help with this sort of thing, but most of them are rubbish, and those that aren’t can only ever give you a fraction of what you need, because most of what you need is moral support from another human being who’s going through or been through the same thing that you are. But if you’re working for yourself, you tend to focus all your energies on your massive to do list, you stop going out because you’re both busy and broke, and you end up isolated and maybe just a little bit mad.

Luckily, there’s help. My friend and colleague Stephanie Booth is organising a conference for freelances called Going Solo. I’m both helping advise and speaking at the event, and I would highly recommend that anyone interested in being a freelance attend, along with anyone who actually is now their own boss, no matter how well established you are.

Going Solo is going to be held in Lausanne, on the shores of Lake Geneva in Switzerland, on 16th May 2008, The early bird tickets are available until the end of March at 400 CHF (Swiss Francs, which is about £196 at today’s exchange rates), going up to 600 CHF (~£294) in April.

So far, speakers include:

• Stowe Boyd
• Suw Charman
• Martin Roell
• Laura Fitton

And topics include:

• skills a freelancer needs (doing the work, marketing and networking, contracts and cash flow)
• fixing prices, closing deals, negotiating contracts (the hardcore businessy stuff)
• what kind of work freelancers in the 2.0 world do (some jobs are more suitable for soloists than others)
• marketing and taking care of one’s social capital (blogging… and being a good online citizen)
• tools of the trade (what software/tools/methods can assist you as a freelancer?)
• co-working and staying in touch with “colleagues” (compensating for “working alone” – we remain social animals)
• challenges in making a passion into a job, dealing with the blurring of the life/work distinction
• international clients, travel, different laws and tax rules, accounting
• soloist or small business?
• adapting to different kinds of clients (in particular, how do you deal with big corporations that you approach or who have approached you)
• is there a market for what I’m doing?

I wish that there had been something like this around ten years ago. I really could have done with not just the information, but also just the knowledge that I wasn’t the only one grappling with this stuff. I still have things to learn – a good consultant never stops learning – and I know I’m going to get a huge amount out of going.