1. "Peering" is a confusing term
   
   While I agree there are some unfortunate connotations of the word, that are ruthlessly exploited by some, it is globally recognised and dealt with in other countries, New Zealand need not set itself apart from this.
   
   Confusion is best addressed by definition not switching terminology. The chosen alternative, oddly selected by InternetNZ and Telecom, is "Internet Interconnect." "Interconnect" brings its own set of connotations, PT&T PSTN interconnect for example, that are better avoided as they are quite misleading in this context. If Wikipedia is to be believed and "The Internet" is a contraction of "The Internet is a worldwide, publicly accessible network of interconnected computer networks," "Internet Interconnect" expands to "Interconnected Network Interconnection" which is prima facae redundant and illustrates that interconnect is intrinsic to the Internet, not a tack-on the way PSTN "Interconnect" has been with the entry of competitors.
   
   
2. Peering is about "Equals"
   
   Peering not about *being* equals, but *behaving* like equals.
   
   
3. Peering is complex
   
   If we examine the longest operating and largest open peering exchange, WIX, we find 160 odd participants of diverse sizes and skills. If peering was complex, it is unlikely that this number of autonomous networks would participate.
   
   While it is possible to elaborate and complicate even the simplest concepts, look at string compared to macramé, the fundamental of peering, which is the fundamental principle of the Internet is:

   the exchange of traffic between members of different, directly connected, networks.

   As noted here, there are a number of other considerations that some are motivated to mix in, but these don't change the basic meaning.
   
   
4. Peering is about "Circuits"
   
   Historically peering (and most other networking) was implemented with circuits, point to point connections, and for reasons of efficiency and administrative simplicity, there were often pairs of circuits, established by each of the peering networks.
   
   This is before the era of cheap metropolitan switched services like CityLINK's PublicLAN which have allowed multiple connections over a single connection with very high performance at relatively low cost. Plus the circuit model doesn't scale, to provide the connections WIX does to 160 participants would require 25,440 such circuits.
   
   What was once canonical is now historical.
   
   
5. Peering is for Service Providers
   
   Empirically false as demonstrated by this list of registrations for the WIX, note, not all registered autonomous networks currently participate.
   
   The fact that changes in networking technology (the move from circuits to switches), costs of equipment (cheap BGP capable routers) has reduced the cost of entry and meant that customers are now intruding on service provider turf. Like most incumbents, this is regarded with concern.
   
   
6. Peering is about cost saving
   
   Peering has a number of other benefits including performance and resiliency. Peering is often deprecated as less important as transit (global rather than local delivery) costs decline. With recent outages in NZ so topical, the benefit of alternative delivery paths to local services is illustrated.
   
   
7. Peering is about carrying another network's traffic
   
   The argument runs that Network B is carrying Network A's traffic when they peer (and vice versa, but "The Folly Of Peering Ratios" by Bill Norton scotches that debate so I won't address it).
   
   The perspective of this view is completely wrong, Network B is carrying its customer's traffic, which is what it is paid to do. Same for the traffic while it is in Network A, it is traffic their customer has paid to send.
   
   Traffic does not belong to the network, it is the customers'.

There's a lot of optimism in the closed proprietary mind, this discussion overlooks the obvious and plumps for the conclusion:

Femtocells may look unlikely, but there's a possibility they may win out.

Yeah, right.

While I'm no longer naive enough to believe it will be one or the other, the idea that a femtocell, which is the tool of the operator, so you'll need one for each proprietary service operator (or change it when you change providers), which you probably therefore aren't willing to pay for, that will use your connectivity (and be prone to its weaknesses) is going to win a major portion of the market where the alternative gives you much greater freedom seems unlikely.

A Wi-Fi access point gives you infinitely greater choice of client devices, services, service providers, that could well outweigh the small performance advantage of limited handsets, limited services, single provider proprietary solutions. And remember, either solution uses the same backhaul.

I don't know the details, but there'd be a lovely irony if your femtocell used VoIP to backhaul the traffic to where you can be charged for it... If the argument that the cellular technology works more reliably from the handset to the femtocell, then why use it instead of DECT or any of the other cordless technologies that we know? There's already a Skype handset that does this.

Makes for a simpler phone? Perhaps, but sales figures for dual-mode handsets (Wi-Fi/Cellular) don't indicate there's any barrier to their uptake.

"Vodafone has no desire to subsidise a Wi-Fi handset"

What vodafone, and the rest of the comfortable incumbents will learn it's not what they desire, but what the customer wants, that occurs in non-monopoly environments. When you read the list of advantages of femtocells, note how many are advantages to the operator, rather than the customer.

The dead giveaway:

But there's an even more powerful business reason why mobile operators want to sell femtocells: they hate Wi-Fi, because users own it and can use it at will.

Not to disparage those operators who are going with UMA (AKA GAN) services like T-Mobile and Orange.

Even in duopolies and oligopolies, there tends to be one less powerful who will seize the chance to change the rules.

Most emperors have a few tailors turn up to sell them new clothes, few as transparently a bad idea as this one.

My basic tenet is that decentralisation and collaboration of small pieces loosely joined is a model that exceeds in many ways the hierarchical monolith of centralisation with its architectural tension between the center and the edge.

The fragmentation of the monolith into smaller pieces is a trend which continues and the latest example I have is the widget. Once standardised, this will allow you to assemble any number of functionalities in interesting ways. Standardisation is critical to extracting the full value of this technique, until then it remains a scattering of smaller or larger ponds in which every boat has to be rebuilt to float in another. We need the ocean.

This is the bite-sizing of the web, extending the power RSS gave us, and beefing up the IFRAME capability of HTML (standardised) and turning web top construction into a drag and drop task.

But that's not what I set out to write about. Currently I'm visiting a few new sites that I might want to use further, Geni.com for example. And every time I do, its the registration, profile population and configuration rigmarole all over again.

Then I read this. Could 2007 be the year of social network fatigue?

It sure is for me,

The number of sites I've been to recently that offer me one service I want, then lard themselves up with a whole lot "Web 2.0 Community" functionality that I already get somewhere else.

Building a community can happen external to almost any service, and if you do want a little more by way of profile from me, let me give it to you from another site. Now that other site is not likely to be MySpace, there have been some hints recently that they are contemplating isolation and freezing out some services that make them more desirable, duh! But from a site I control.

Now this must be sounding OpenID-esque, (not without critics) about which I know very little despite guru Doc Searls being heavily involved. I tried Sxipper, I hated it, which probably means I don't understand it well enough, but it was intrusive, gigantic and not much help.

When I go to a new site, if I register, I want to give them a password, a URL, and have them suck my favourite movies, books, etc. etc. into their application (and sync it if I change anything). Then in the small pieces loosely joined widgety world, I can hook together the various parts of my presence without repeating myself to every web site I meet from Amazon to Weebly.

Something at the data/information rather than functionality, operating in an X11-like "I am the server" mode and you are my client. Resonates with Doc's VRM musings well.

One of my gurus, Martin Geddes of Telepocalypse is Chief Analyst at, and led me to, Telco 2.0.

By and large they come up with sensible ideas about the future of telecommunications, though they take that difficult position of straddling the disruptive divide between the incumbent past and the faster moving future. The risk of having one foot in the grip of large, slow moving, comfortable monopoly incumbent from the past, and the other in the future agile novel disruptive world of diversity can easily be imagined.

But a recent post to their blog showed their savvy about the trend, and I was happily reading away, as one does when the content is agreeable, until I struck this line, and I acknowlege I may misunderstand and/or put too much weight on a single phrase, but:

The uncertainty of regulatory intervention ultimately works against the carriers, as it drives away risk capital.

Doesn't "uncertainty" = "risk?" or is this some use of either term with which I was not previously familiar?

Isn't uncertainty precisely where risk capital is supposed to be invested?

This of course is one of the many hypocrisies of our brave infrastructure capitalists, risk rewards for gilt-edged security. Champagne on a beer budget.

They bloviate about the risk, while its arguable there is zero risk in frequencies, copper or fibre. They will all return, not at the monopoly rent level that may be their wish, but how much more sunk could a cost be than copper?

Yes, there have been losses on all those infrastructures, but I would argue it was because of over-enthusiatic investment based on monopoly rent returns on stove-piped services that didn't arrive.

Even fibre's cheap, if you're not a Telco ("How we paid the construction guys 18 pints of beer and they gave us a free metro fibre network in Palmy North")

Not sure of the situation in the UK, but our roads, sewers, water pipes, electricity lines, ie all transport infrastructures are funded by the commons, the services over them from a range of suppliers. Telecommunications at the fibre, frequency or copper, is no different.

You can debate the options, but its done when AT&T do it.

Having proprietary service/carriage integration in this day and age is like banks issuing their own currency.

"Triple Play" is where an infrastructure operator (their own or unbundled from an incumbent) provides Telephony, TV and Internet access in a bundle to the customer in order to optimise revenue.

Sounds good. There are only a couple of flaws.

1. TV hasn't been a license to print money for a long time, Telephony service revenues are plummeting and Internet access will continue to commoditise. Its a tribute to the enthusiasm to believe that "content is King," (its not, never has been, less since the supply has burgeoned so extraordinarily) and that a saviour exists to sustain margins as scarcity dwindles that even the best salesfolk can peddle this nonsense, along with the dreams of IMS. IMS, as far as I can see, is the ATM of the 2000's, an over complex solution to a problem that requires ubiquity of the supplier to solve.

2. As you may be aware, GNU, of the free software license fame is a recursive acronym, standing for "GNU's not Unix," recursion being the recurrence of the whole in the expansion. Triple Play suffers the same irony, they sell it as discreet services, however TV and Telephony can, unless degrading steps are taken, be delivered via the Internet service portion of the triple...

Thus it would seem one of the benefits (and essentials) of the Triple Play is to knee-cap the Internet ensuring the other parts of the Play play their part in producing revenue for the operator. Perhaps this is part of the reason AT&T/BellSouth struggled so mightily against Net Neutrality provisions and managed to sequester this threat to their legacy copper network (at least excluding U-verse from the agreement), a tactic Telecom repeats in New Zealand.

Taking the usual short cut to Lambton Quay via the James Cook, I was coincidentally redirected (due to a woman on crutches ahead of me on the usual route) via the reception area and as I walked through I noticed a man with a headset and a small palmtop with an image on it...

Not wishing to intrude I walked past, paused, walked back, glimpsed, walked away again and waited for the lift. It might be nothing to do with CafeNET. If he was connected, maybe it was cellular, but something about his location suggested, since cellular coverage is everywhere, right? that he was there for CafeNET.

So I walked back a second time and politely inquired what he was doing. Like the vast majority of people doing geeky things in public, he was very forthcoming. Yes, he was using CafeNET ("a wonderful service"), Skype and a Sony Vaio (perhaps there's still more to Sony than root kits, burning batteries and stupid squabbles about media standards) to conduct a video call to his friend in California.

Theory, and demos are hardly more than that, doesn't ever truly convey the reality of an activity like finding a user in the wild. I'm sure the user isn't necessarily representative of that mysterious majority, but even one real spontaneous user is worth a bushel of demos or reports.

The device had a reasonable screen, two cameras (one facing away from the screen, which he had used the night before to show the crowd in Sojourn to Holly in California) and a slide away (I think) keyboard, and touch-sensitive screen and stylus. And it was tiny, not much larger than a CD crystal case. Ah, finally, found it.

Not suggesting this is new or unique, except that it is for me. A long held belief that over time Wi-FI/CafeNET would be adopted for live communication (VoIP or video, or both) and that this will make it a must-have in any location people gather. Like light, heating and the other grace & favour services premises must supply to succeed.

A long time ago, so long that the only reference I can find is this, sidewalks, AKA footpaths, were cited as the appropriate analogy for the open network CityLink is building and operating.

"[W]e're providing an electronic footpath [sidewalk] for the city"

Odd then that relatively contemporaneously two other commentators should seize upon the model. Bob Frankston humourously illustrates Telco thinking in tangible, domestic terms using Quality of Stroll in connection with sidewalks and Susan Crawford uses it in explaining "Net Neutrality."

Good to see, telecommunications has for too long presented itself as something uniquely complex, when in fact it is simply just another transportation infrastructure, which historically has required, or best been implemented as, a single operator providing both infrastructure and services. A requirement which has been eliminated by the layered model and better performing hardware and protocols.

Another example arguing the case for structural separation, and perhaps even greater investment in the infrastructure (as in rail and roads in New Zealand) by central and/or local government.

Perhaps the business plan could be proprietary operators pay. IE, cellular operators with the video dreams pay per stream delivered at a charge to their subscribers. Proportional perhaps to the volume charge of the operator...

UPDATE Tuesday, November 7th, 2006: YouTube In Talks To Open TheirTube Services Only For Verizon Customers

Ah, it is recognised that the assumption that the incumbent would be motivated by the risk of appearing before the regulator wasn't at all scary, however the new entrants are much more concerned. And the bilateral model has been shown weak. Who would have expected negotiation between an extraordinarily powerful incumbent and new entrants? You might as well expect success in competition between the All Blacks and a team of primary new entrants.

Open access to offers regulated... again, not surprising that this would be more successful than individual bilateral determinations.

And now to address the duopoly. Bears all the hallmarks Taylor addressed in the wireline broadband markets (who also noted that direct overseas investment in non-infrastructure activities will increase with better infrastructure. A case for collective investment in infrastructure?)

Encouragement to Telecom to co-operate with customers, regulator and industry.

Ensconced at home with a CafeNET GoWEEK card, I'm watching the stream from R2.

Very interesting watching the proprietary (as in single company, single platform, not the "proprietary" some ascribe to MP3 for instance (patented, but implemented extraordinarily widely) client struggle with the 2Mbs stream, a smart edge, but not smart enough to adjust to 1024Kbps out of 1536Kbps it reports available...

The morning session has been disrupted twice by late arrivals, but the agenda was:

The vision for telecommunications in New Zealand

8:45am Theresa Gattung, CEO, Telecom New Zealand

Pushed the patriotic buttons, acquiesced with willing to the regulatory plan announced by Government. Still tried the "cherry picking" smear on competitiors when we all know ADSL+ will not be initially deployed in the rural environment. Lots of talk about "customer control," which in fact equates to "self-provisioning" rather than choice of service provider. The wholesale charter (and TVNZ has shown how effect such documents are, even when applied with the power of the State) was mentioned often. Interesting that the AAPT experience with Telstra was mentioned as an inspiration, I would have AAPT write our regulations...

9:05am Russell Stanners, CEO, Vodafone New Zealand

Visionary, but I missed a lot of it, Russell followed Michael.

9:25am Michael Boggs, CFO, TelstraClear

Lots of news about how TCL plans to improve its customer service, drive its own network.

9:45am Minister Cunliffe

Late, so followed the panel discussion.

Thanks Theresa for displaying willing. Stocktake, process. "A thorough and robust process." Economic research from Economist, consultants and vendors... Customer's producers and content choosers. Global participation. (Could the Commissioner look any more grim?) Review of regulatory plans, government as customer, alternative infrastructure and spectrum availability.

Myth: Rural disadvantaged. No.
Myth: Regulatory creep. No more patching.

Pricing: "efficient costs"

When: "realistic expectations" Amendment introduced mid-year, potentially till 2007. "Full market effects may not be felt until 2007/8."

"Far too much, for far too little [] for far too long"

10:10am Panel Discussion — Theresa Gattung, Russell Stanners & Michael Boggs

First question to Paul Budde, who speaks later. The "investment" question arises, after the billions we plan to spend on roads, and the declining cost of infrastructure, ability of communities and small companies to enter the market is not referenced. Graeme rebuts the "dispersed population" canard and addresses the regional community entrants.

Privacy was asked about...

Might have been nice to have questioners identify themselves by name and affiliation.

How to drive uptake? Lots of talk about advertising, but price drops only obliquely referenced.

Malcolm Dick, Callplus: Re-iteration of will Telecom co-operate regarding the Callplus application to the Commissioner. NO COMMENT.

Paul Budde, again: Wireless broadband? Why is Theresa so confident of wireless, given its historic failure and predictions of 2012 before 4G.

Theresa: customers choosing it.. easier path however slow... "Not voice driving growth, its everything else
Russell: vendor failure to deliver kit, now its starting.
Graeme: Mobile to the individual, not the business/residential


In "vision" Theresa and Russell lead, Michael, in true telco fashion assumes what they do is the future of NZ, there was little in his address that went outside of TelstraClear's plans. Some assembly required. IT rather than Telco model (competition & customer choice of use and service provision vs single supplier with usage charges).

Most nation states are formed on the otherwise dispassionate globe in the same conflict prone manner as tectonic plates. They rub and collide causing huge disruptions, and in the global example, its going to be a while before we'll be able to do anything like predict, let alone mitigate that inevitability.

Nation states on the other hand are recently emergent behaviours and within the usual caveat about the rate of change of culture, able to be modified, or as seems to be the mode for most centrally controlled proprietary business models (for one way or another, governance and culture are business models, just not necessarily concerned only with financial results), they will fade in significance.

As always, beneficiaries of the current incumbents will blare and bray about how they, and they alone, not you mortal child, can clear-sightedly identify the problem, promulgate increasing complex processes and procedures and LO! We are saved.

The global Internet is similarly dispassionate about how we organise above its nature and infrastructure, and as part of the transition we have hooked the Internet to geography, for no other reason than administrative convenience, and we watch as the institutions of various geographic areas seek to impose their rules on citizens of other nation states.

it is as if I could erect a billboard in my back yard with a Swastika (the Nazi one) on it, which, if it could be seen in France, its judiciary would be able to invoke the NZ State to coerce me into removing it. Ah the inertia of systems, and their love of voodoo. ("Violence & Voodoo")

An alternative which occurred to me recently, ANDTOS ("and no doubt, to others sooner"), would be that using citizen managed closed networks, WASTE for example, we may be able to rebuild the global Internet village.

Of course, with the constraints of geography swept away, membership of multiple villages, and the unlimited geographical spread of citizens would be inviolate rights, though equally, and individual might choose to be a member of only a single village and not participate outside of the activities there. Mennonites.

The recreation of the small, shared-interest (even if it be only ranting and flaming each other) network should restore some of the trust that may be reduced in a network you share with everyone else in the world, but the global nature of life, the earth, the net must not be forgotten.

We have lived long with the consequences of accidents of birth, in to family, tribe, gender, culture, disability and geography, it seems the Internet will allow us to choose the virtual world(s) in which we wish to participate.

While this fragmentation may resemble various schisms, it doesn't bear the exclusionary "must make a choice" stress that may have been the cause of problems in the past. And the fragments are as fully connected as they or their members wish to be.

We have the beginnings of such multiple worlds in the sites we choose to visit today.

I'm not advocating a carve-up or Balkanisation of the Internet (CF. portals, walled-gardens, closed-shops), on the contrary, I'm suggesting that we can find such an armour of overlapping and interconnected small rings, that no adversary could penetrate, and every friend could enter.

I hope such networks begin in neighbourhoods, supporting pico-peered, IPv6, wireless clusters.

"Telcos are to the economy what railroads were to the 19th century and maybe what airlines were to the 20th ... building this great big capacity for things to be transferred." John O'Sullivan, CEO Optus

It explains a lot.

Particularly looking at railways in NZ where a share-holder driven company rode the infrastructure down to where the State has a $NZ300M bill to bring it back to scratch. An expensive lesson that hopefully teaches a wider lesson about structural seperation and how it is possible for the commons to own an infrastructure and let multiple service providers operate over it.

The other aspect of John's analogy is, "Where's my car?" Private ownership of self-drive automobiles provides a lot more passenger miles than railways.

And finally, last September I was musing that the next paradigm for telecommunications would be the ocean, Optus's CEO thinks the age of rail still exists in telecommunications. Our timetable, our services, no choice... sorry, when I look at the shabby glory of the Wellington Railway Station, I don't think it still holds that significant a place in the whole transport story.

The competition between VoIP and the PSTN shapes up much like highways versus railroads. The operator of the PSTN and railroad own their transport network. VoIP companies and car companies do not. Railroads and the PSTN support a single type of usage. Highways and the Internet allow all user types to commingle. The emergence of highways empowered people to control many more aspects of their transportation needs rather than depend on the schedules and railroad routes available. The Internet accomplishes the same thing for communications. Automobiles and highways gave rise to an entirely separate industry and provided the basis for new types of commerce. The Internet offers the same promise, and corporate chieftains with traditional telecom assets find themselves in the same position as the railroad barons when Henry Ford got rolling.

ObURL: http://www.gigaom.com/2004/09/the_voice_over_i.php

Adaptix has emerged, to a surprisingly muted reception, as one of the first "pure play" WiMAX vendors. Adaptix hopes to leverage two bleeding-edge trends in BWIA - Software Radio (formerly called Software Defined Radio - SDR) and Mobility to (theoretically) encompass licensed, license-exempt, and newly-emerging spectrum allocations from 700 MHz to 6 GHz.

Software radios are what will probably finally lay the complex core wireless systems to rest. Mobile will continue to have power issues for a while, but I suspect both the improvement in mobile power supply and efficiency and performance of the chips will mean it won't make any difference, mobile or fixed, in the future. As the differences lessen the mass market grows and a new platform is born. Trying to hold onto a vertically integrated, stove-piped or forward channel integrated model in this rapidly changing sector will introduce shearing forces into the structure than nothing can resist.

ObURL: http://www.corante.com/bwia/archives/005821.html#more

I know I'm probably not making it clear, but it was Voltaire who said The way to become boring is to say everything."

The point I'm trying to make with these network arguments, and the ones I probably haven't made yet with respect to "Code Is Law," and "Law Is Code" and the fact that the platform for Law is so unreliable (compare and contrast) with the platform for Code is so reliable (leeway, did someone mention leeway? Slack?) Is that government is a network, and the first amendment said the network shall make no law abridging the communication of the people.

The democratic experiment was an end to end network, let the edge decide, networking of the people by the people for the people. And we are so close...

To escaping even the potential for tyranny of information…