There is hope for Wireless Cities. There is always hope.

[David Farber <dave () farber net>]

________________________________________
From: ken [ken () new-isp net]
Sent: Friday, March 28, 2008 6:40 AM
To: Bob Frankston
Cc: 'Dewayne Hendricks'; David Farber; dpreed () reed com
Subject: There is hope for Wireless Cities. There is always hope.

Bob,

Again, I am grateful for the time you have put into this debate and I am
enjoying the discussion, as I hope you are.

So, once more, into the breach, as a friend of mine so casually says...


On Thu, 2008-03-27 at 19:50 -0400, Bob Frankston wrote:
> I’m cc’ing Dave and Dewayne because you questions probably echo theirs
> and I think that this is at the heart of much of the policy debate.
> This is the local face of the IMS debate – is the value in the network
> or outside of it?

If the people you are cc'ing find an interest in this discussion, I am
certainly glad to have them here and invite them to join in, should they
choose to do so.

We do agree on one point, the debate is raging but whether the real
value is "in the network or outside of it" is a rather interesting
perspective. Conversely, the harsh reality is that there must be a
functioning data transportation mechanism in place or there is no
value.

In an earlier post you mentioned a time when home networking was
measured in terms of dialup or ISDN. I would like to point out that not
only does a functioning network have to be in place but that it must
also be of sufficient capacity to carry all of the tasks we would like
to assign to it or it is virtually valueless. As we now all look at
dialup and ISDN as wholly unusable, whatever we build must meet the
needs of society or we are only providing an illusion.

> I feel like I’m trying, to use Henry Ford’s analogy, to explain that a
> car is not a faster horse. You’re right – I am responding to your
> question but not answering it. What I am doing is examining your
> assumptions and saying that the way you’re stating the problem begs
> the question by presuming that we can define the services in the
> network and by assuming that there is a viable business model. If you
> reread my response from that perspective it might make more sense.

I got that the first time around, honestly. One of the disconnects we
seem to be having here is that you appear to be applying a mindset to
me that I totally reject. I am not for a closed or walled garden, I'm
squarely behind the push to build a viable alternative communications
vehicle that will exert pressure on the traditional telecommunications
companies to lower their prices and increase their services. I believe
that the mechanism to do this is through market competition but I will
agree that the regulatorium is stacked against this type of action.

From my perspective, the answer is to leverage "disruptive technology"
in a manner that forces both the competition and the regulatorium to
constantly catch up. By this I mean, as technology leads legislation,
oftentimes by several years, there is a window of opportunity for a
fast-moving company to continually evolve both their strategy and their
business model while remaining dependent on the fact that the duopoly is
incapable of analyzing and appropriately responding in the necessary
time frame.

Stated simply, a company that can leverage newly developed technology
will be able to successfully deploy this technology, stealing critical
market share while both the duopoly and the regulatorium try to create
a strategy to deal with this phenomenon. We both understand that the
duopoly works on a system where once a problem is discovered they will
hold endless meetings, where a strategy will be formed, usually after
extensively studying the issue, a budget will then be put in place and
from there some form of action will be launched. The regulatorium works
in much the same way. In that extensive time frame a tech savvy company
has the opportunity to gain critical mass and then switch strategies so
as to leave the far slower organizations behind. This now becomes a
never-ending process and the market dynamics become irreversibly
altered.

> That new methodology is the Internet and it provides opportunity but
> can’t supply all of our needs. What does it mean to supply *all* of
> our needs? Maybe that very concept is at the heart of our failure to
> communicate – the Internet does a better job than traditional telecom
> by doing less in the network so as to avoid prejudging our needs.

Here is another disconnect. I am not in favor of traditional telecom
either in technology or business model. In fact, I am trying to exert
enough market pressure to force them to change or become obsolete.

The Internet isn't the cloud that most power point presentations use as
a representation, it is real hardware backed by real people that makes
this infrastructure continually function. I know you understand this.

Where we sharply disagree is in your assertion that we should be able to
do "less" doing less is what got us into this mess. It is time to do
more - and not in the classic duopoly style but rather in ways that uses
what the duopoly has done correctly (and I would like to think we both
agree there are some things which we can attribute to them as being done
correctly) while moving past them to do what is necessary.

I am proposing selling pipes to businesses and people who are very
willing to buy them. I would place no restrictions on how they are used,
or even who would be able to use them. There is a real cost for hardware
and the people who will continually do the maintenance on this network
and those costs have to be covered.

Now, if you believe that you have another mechanism, please share it
with us - because, from where I sit, in the near term, I am not hearing
anything concrete as to how you would fix this problem or create
anything tangible to alleviate this most crucial problem.

> There isn’t necessarily a sustainable business model in providing
> networking as a service (though there can be specific cases just like
> we can have a few private roads). I call the idea networking paid for
> by the sales of services  the “muni-bell” model – emulating the
> traditional telecom model but this time locally. If the model isn’t
> working (which is why we feel the need to do something different) then
> there is no reason to assume it word work better at a smaller scale.
> If anything the reforming of the bells says that the model requires
> scale – though we’re running out of possible merger partners.

I beg to differ with you.

The model is working, even though we both understand that it is not as
efficient as we would both like. What I can demonstrate is an
improvement on that model, one that will work today but I keep asking
you to specify how your model will work and you seem to not want to
share this with us.

People will pay for services - this is a reality in life. Even when
people can do something for themselves, they oftentimes do not. As a
specific example, we can see people who will pay someone to cut their
lawn while they go to a health club and walk on a treadmill. Go figure.

Here is a real world education I was given from one of my ex-customers.
Her business was 100% net driven. Everything that touched her business
came across the connection I provided; telephone, fax, her web site, the
ability to order from her suppliers and track their shipments, with all
of her satellite offices (worldwide) being connected to the corporate
office in one giant virtual LAN - everything - all came across the net.
She once told me, and I have no reason to doubt her, that a major
outage, something on the order of four hours, would cost her $100K. The
fact she was paying me a paltry $1K/month was an incredible bargain for
her. Now, there is one more component to this education, even given the
reality that this connection was critical to her business, she did not
have any desire to hire someone and do it in house because it did not
make economic sense for he to do so. She was more than willing to pay a
professional company like mine to handle this "service" for her.

This is a decisions that many businesses make and even if you were to
offer them a "magic box" for free that they would have to manage - or
even never touch - that would handle all of their communications needs I
can assure you, you would meet resistance because people like having a
person they can hand off responsibility to in cases where do not want to
deal with it themselves.

Case in point, I could probably learn how to do surgery, but I would
choose to hire a very expensive professional should my family ever need
one.

> The bell model is so attractive – it’s familiar and builds on the
> presumption that we know what the services are that it’s just a matter
> of building it (to meet all our needs). This fails to recognize that
> the Internet is a dynamic
> (http://www.frankston.com/?name=InternetDynamic) and not a thing. The
> point of the end-to-end argument is that the answer is not found
> inside the network but in how we use the network.

Yes, I get this.

But there needs to be conduits that this wonderful set of services can
pass through - conduits that cost money, conduits that must be able to
carry ever-increasing loads, because as sure as the sun will rise
tomorrow, we will see an increase, month over month, of bandwidth
demand.

Is there an artificial scarcity? You betcha!

But there is a real scarcity as well. You pointed that out when you
decided to see if you could communicate with Hong Kong at gigabit
speeds. However, I can pretty much assure you that the best intentions
will not fix that problem, real hardware that lights up fiber will - and
every single time that fiber has a problem it is going to have to be
repaired. That is a real cost and it has to be accounted for.


> Part of the confusion stems from the ambiguity in the terms
> “networking” and “networks”. If we apply the terms to social
> networking it’s obvious that we create our social network by
> networking. This is the same process that applies when we do
> networking using whatever is available. With Ethernet we cooperate in
> using the medium using CSMA. You can think of a token ring as way to
> form a community. They are not services – they are a kind of
> community.

Okay...

> The telecom (OK the GSM) industry acknowledges that they do not have a
> sustainable business model –
>  http://www.frankston.com/?name=AssuringScarcity. I address the issue
> of municipal connectivity more directly in
> http://www.frankston.com/?name=WiFiEdge. In
> http://www.frankston.com/?Name=Railroads I compare a business model
> for networking to a business model for driving as if roads were a
> railroad – it doesn’t translate.

I would like to snip a quote (admittedly out of context) from your
article titled, "WiFi Edge"

"We should assume that we have abundant common infrastructure funded as
a commons rather than as billable services and then work to transition
to this model. The cost will be less than we pay now for redundant
transports and the capacity will be available via fibers and wires as
well as without wires. Without having to contain the bits for billing
purposes we will view those providing access as contributing to the
common good rather than competing with a provider."

You make the statement that "The cost will be less than we pay now for
redundant transports and the capacity will be available via fibers and
wires as well as without wires."

I would challenge your assumption there with the understanding that you
are making a claim that this build out will be cheaper - but for who?
If we look at your proposal you are suggesting that we (now I am making
an assumption that the government will coordinate all of this) but I do
not see how, specifically, you would make this work. I do see years of
fighting to put something like this in place - if it ever were to come
about.

Here's another reality, one that I wish was not so, we do not have the
money. We don't have the money to rebuild New Orleans, our crumbling
highways and bridges, to feed our population, provide medical care for
all of our people (while ironically we pay more to not provide care than
it would cost us to provide it) upgrade our outdated housing stock,
homes that were built in a time when energy costs were not a concern or
our energy production capacities - and you believe you can motivate the
American public to make this investment?

> It’s important to distinguish between getting funding and a
> sustainable business model – there are a number of FTTH projects
> premised on service-based revenues but we mustn’t confuse getting
> funding with a viable business model – the mission isn’t accomplished
> when you get financing. The problems with funding municipal Wi-Fi may
> be more immediately obvious because we don’t have the revenue from
> existing TV and phone services so we have to confront the financial
> issues immediately. By making performance and coverage promises we are
> also saddling ourselves with high expenses up front rather than
> sharing the costs and using existing facilities and only investing
> as-needed. In fact if we take advantage of what we already have by
> leveraging existing copper and fiber and access points the investment
> is nil.

Yes, there is a difference between raising money and building a
sustainable business model but ironically, I have a concrete plan to
build a sustainable infrastructure and I have yet to see how you would
do the same, at least in any specific manner.

As to the statement that, "In fact if we take advantage of what we
already have by leveraging existing copper and fiber and access points
the investment is nil." this is completely unrealistic, from my
perspective. There is a very real cost, a cost to repair the crappy
copper wiring , some of which was deployed on the streets of Waltham
back in the 1950s and 1960s. There is a cost to splice into that fiber,
attach hardware, provide power to these devices, purchase these access
points and most of all, what you end us with is a network that needs to
be repaired on a regular basis - as in "truck meets pole" or "oops" said
the backhoe operator and someone has to fix that mess - fast.

> We actually have abundant capacity but we aren’t taking advantage of
> it for various reasons. The biggest is the bell model which requires
> that we bill for elements out of context. Also important is that we
> don’t use the current IP connectivity for much beyond browsing and
> some video. Instead of funding new infrastructure why aren’t we using
> what we have for city services and education and more?

Hmm, I must be reading the wrong information because I keep hearing
about how all of the ILECs have announced plans to convert their
networks to Ethernet - not that I care.

Because this incurred cost you are proposing does not get us from where
I believe we are to where I want to see us go.

You are talking about using WiFi at the edge - let's face it, that is a
shared 5Mbps service and that is NOT suitable for our needs now - let
alone next year or the year after. I have a 15 year old son that can
suck up every last drop of a 5Mbps connection (and does) all by himself.

We are setting different goals for society. I want to set the minimum at
10Mbps as being "barely usable" in all areas with an increase to 30Mbps
next year and 50Mbps the year after. These connections would be full
duplex, symmetrical and always available - 100% uptime, or as close to
that as we can come.

For business, I want to be able to provide shared gigabit connectivity,
unrestricted, for the current cost of a T1 in our least expensive
markets - and this within 36 months.

The network I envision would be an open access network, available for
anyone and everyone to purchase transport on, carry whatever services
they wish and only the true cost to keep this network operational would
be passed on to the customer. Additionally, the accounting for this
association would be open to everyone for review but the management
would make decisions as to how they believe the corporation should be
run, answerable only to the people who invested who will be paid a fair
return on their investment as part of the real cost of this project.

And yes, I freely admit that this plan is not perfect - BUT - I could
start in a city like Pittsburgh and be operational in a few months.
Inside of a two year periods I would have 100% coverage in the greater
Pittsburgh area while not costing the city itself one cent. Once proved,
this model could be "exported" to other cities and I look forward to
seeing cities like São Paulo and Bombay leap to life (in a manner of
speaking) in a matter of months. Once the initial push takes off the
cost of equipment drops, the price to deploy the network falls as does
the end users bills. Eventually, sooner, rather than later, a 100% free
service will be offered that is best effort but carries a significant
throughput so as to allow everyone to receive value from this network.

> One of the points of the end-to-end arguments is that have very
> diverse needs and we need to do less in the network more with the
> network. Reliable transport isn’t necessarily the right answer in many
> cases. If we do depend on the network for something so simple as
> guaranteed delivery then we are in peril because we aren’t prepared
> for failure while paying a high price as if we can really avoid
> failure.

I reject this argument and counter it with this is nothing more than an
engineering problem. The network MUST be designed with reliability in
mind but with the mindset of the cabinet maker you mentioned earlier.

We do not have to tolerate failure, we are not some banana republic that
oversubscribes everything because we cannot plan for the future and we
do not have to sacrifice the future of our children due to our lack of
vision.

> The answer is not to be found in the network but in ourselves and our
> ability to network.

Nice thought.

Well, while you are working on how you can convert your vision into a
reality, I will continue in my project to deliver real, usable broadband
to the masses while undercutting the foundations of the duopoly, as best
I am able.

To my way of thinking, the best way to change the regulatorium is to
build a better model and invite them to come visit it. The second step
is to call the media and explain how this could never have been done
without the help of every single person that stood in your way. After,
there is the picture taking of the obligatory handshaking and perhaps a
ribbon cutting ceremony.

It's a strange world we live in but one where the system needs to be
massaged from within. I lived through the sixties, I understand that
revolution sounds nice but real change is an evolutionary process. At
the same time, I would love to see you hit your goals while exceeding
the ones I have set out for myself. The true aim is to provide what our
society so critically needs, through whatever method can function while
doing so in as short period of time as possible.

I want you to know, if I could ever assist in making those goals come to
fruition, I am not so vain as to expect my vision to be the only correct
one.

Back to you...




> -----Original Message-----
> From: ken [mailto:ken () new-isp net]
> Sent: Thursday, March 27, 2008 06:04
> To: Bob Frankston
> Subject: RE: [IP] Hopes for Wireless Cities Fade as Internet Providers
> Pull Out
>
>
>
> Bob,
>
>
>
> I am at a loss to reply to your last message, quite frankly, because I
> cannot align anything in your reply with I described in my last post.
>
>
>
> What I did, or more correctly tried to do, was to clearly lay out what
> I believe is a viable network concept, one backed up by a sustainable
> business model.
>
>
>
> What I believe would be helpful is for you to clearly specify exactly
> what you would deploy, how it would function, where the money would
> come from to pay for the initial build out as well as the continuing
> operation and maintenance.
>
>
>
> In keeping with the concept I outlined, please restrict your design to
> currently available components.
>
>
>
> Once you have made this information available I believe we can all
> intelligently review your proposal and make a determination as to the
> viability of this idea.
>
>
>
> I look forward to being introduced to an entirely new methodology that
> will provide for our common goals of an unrestricted network that is
> capable of supplying *all* of our needs in a sustainable manner.
>
>
>
> Thank you,
>
>
>
> Ken

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