Tag Archive for 'cloud'

Is the future of TV in doubt?

Published on January 31, 2012 in Adrian's tech blog. 0 Comments Tags: , , , , , , .

Today Sky announced its to launch a standalone TV service. This seems perfectly timed given that NetFlix has recently entered the UK market, joining Amazon’s LoveFilms and a rash of other services and platforms like Google’s YouTube, Apple.TV, and the BBC’s iPlayer.

All this reminded me of something I heard a while back at last years Broadcast Evolution Summit in Cannes – a very good event but notable for the complete absence of any internet “broadcast” companies and a large number of traditional TV executive who were showing very real signs that they didn’t really get what was about to happen to them.

At the Summit, it was pointed out that it took something like half-a-century before a car had stopped looking like horse-drawn carriage. Similarly, early TV’s often looked like some odd amalgam of sitting room furniture and a radiogram; it then took another generation to pass before colour was added; and another until HD was added.

But now TV has joined the internet; a medium that evolves in months a years rather than years and decades, and its notable that its the Internet pioneers that are making the early ground, not TV stalwarts.

I’ll give you an example. At the Summit there was lots of talk about linear and non-linear TV:

  • Linear is the way we watch broadcast TV, where there is a constant stream flowing past us and we have a simple binary choice to watch it or not.
  • Non-linear is recorded TV where we dip into a pool of content and choose what to watch and the order in which we watch it; this is what happens when we record stuff on our PVR, visit YouTube, drop by Mubi, install Boxee, go to Witney.TV or use the iPlayer catch-up services.

This list is long and that’s because just about all of the innovation is being made by non-linear companies and the distinction they are making with linear models is rapidly eroding.

At the Summit I reminded the audience that at a gigabit it was possible to download an HD movie in a lot less than 30-seconds. Puzzlement! Why do I care?

That’s less time than it takes to broadcast an ad – while you are watching the ad, your next HD programme will be streamed to your box; the choice of programming could be pre-booked by you or it could be carefully selected by a service that collects meta-data from your previous watching patterns, taking in Last.FM’s Love/Hate buttons, and your social media connections, linking you to your communities of interest.

Today the concept of “Spotify for HD TV” is well within grasp – Love Film has launched the first steps towards it, and with Amazon’s cloud infrastructure behind it it is only a matter of time (months rather than years).

Is this linear or non-linear? And who really cares? One thing is for certain,  TV executives shouldn’t!

Traditional media companies have highly skilled staff and are able to create top draw content within islands of trust backed by the very best creative labs; even if their brands may have to do battle with major global players like Apple and Google for platform space, their content should remain king. But this, in the medium term, will only remain a valuable asset if the linear mindset is put to bed.

I understand Google has set YouTube a strategic goal to increase viewing time from minutes to hours per day. This is why is so important to Google – unless the transmission medium is reliable they won’t be able to secure the rights to the very best content. If you were Disney would you sign away your content to a platform that regularly pixelates the most valuable asset attached to your brand?

I’ve written before about net neutrality and how ALA is about to deliver the tools that for innovative internet aware companies will remove the chance of pixelated content over pervasive and very fast networks so I won’t repeat myself here except to say that I’ve had far, far more interesting conversations about content delivery from internet companies who are beginning to get it, and far, far more puzzled or dismissive faces from traditional broadcast companies who don’t.

How long will it be before Google or Amazon try to secure premiership football rights? And who would bet against them?

For the time being at least it seems TV companies are playing catch-up. The speed of change is far, far quicker than anything they have experienced before, and they are being measured against companies who are comfortable working at that speed.

Open is the best (only) policy – Ghost of Christmas Future

Published on December 17, 2011 in Adrian's tech blog. 1 Comment Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , .

In my last post (Open is the best (only) policy) I gave a high-level view on why I think open access networks are important today but I didn’t really explore why I think that offers just a narrow glimpse of why open access will become the single most important thing network operators can do for their customers, and why the UK is unknowingly paving the way.

So a bold statement:

I think that Active Line Access (ALA) will become one of the most important features of public networks in the years to come – but it will take a little time for that to become apparent. I also know that so far very few people have understood this.

When I talk to people who build public networks they typically see ALA as the necessary replacement to PPP/L2TP; that its the technical remedy that allows them to hand-off connections to ISPs in an world. They are of course right in a very practical, narrow sense but what the NICC did in codifying a long list of technical standards was much, much more than that.

When I talk to people who build campus networks their immediate response is what’s all the fuss about; ALA is a codified collection of standards that large corporates have been using for many years. Again broadly true but they have forgotten what their lives were like before they had these tools.

A Ghost of Christmas Past

Travelling back 15 years to the world of large corporates, a network managers lot was very difficult. They typically had the biggest budget in the IT department with the biggest sign-off but they also found it the hardest to provide direct empirical evidence that any incremental increase in their budget would deliver a greater incremental impact on the business; granular return on investment calculations were impossible.

Around this time I started to talk about the proximity to business, and it went like this:

  • The applications people had a direct relationship to the business so anything they did had a direct and immediate bearing on the business; incremental change could be measured and valued.
  • The core software people, like database administrators, were closely coupled to the applications people so although they were one step removed from the business and their systems may be shared, they were were close enough to the business they could measure their impact.
  • The server teams were further removed and incremental investment is beginning to become more challenging because their world is now two layers removed and increasingly shared but by working closely with the applications and core software people they could typically prove enough incremental value to justify additional investment.
  • The network teams were by definition universally shared and with no direct connection to parts of the business, only to the business as a whole; at this time, budget meetings in times of major shifts in the business were a pretty unpleasant affair and something most network managers dreaded (or at least the ones focussed on the business did)

With Y2K looming, I started to focus on how I could bridge the void and improve my proximity to the business. It was also at this time that what I then called 3D networks were beginning to be possible. Traditional 2D networks were a trade-off between distance and speed but 3D networks had a policy axis using a combination of VLANs and qualities of service; combining these meant I now had a granular control over the network and could therefore finely adapt the network in response to changing business needs – it was now possible to improve the network’s proximity to the business and therefore provide a direct and measurable impact. Budget meetings could now be constructive and less confrontational.

It took time for the ideas of 3D networking to take hold, and my name for it never stuck, but today any private network manager of any merit should be able to have a direct dialogue with the business.

When the NICC created ALA, they codified the tools that private network managers use; they put in place the mechanisms to improve the proximity of public networks to people and businesses – and the impact of that will, in time, be far more profound.

A Ghost of Christmas Future

It often takes a single event to focus minds and create the conditions for a shift of this kind:

  • For private network managers it was Y2K, when vast sums were spent renovating application platforms and they needed to justify their budgets.
  • For public networks it will be the shift to NGA network we’re just beginning.

So when I talk about Service Providers I’m not being lazy and omitting “” because I assume they’ re synonymous;  its because I think ISPs are in reality a general-purpose subset of Service Providers – that once “providers of service” become aware of what the NICC has done the service provider market will become a whole lot richer and more exciting.

I had hoped the NHS might have been the pioneer in this space – the confluence of PSNs and the emergence of NGA is an opportunity that should be grabbed with both hands – but I suspect it will take a major commercial company to make the first move.

Who might the early movers be? The major companies and content delivery networks (CDNs) are the obvious choices, and who better than Google (with YouTube) and Amazon Web Services (with Love Films).

Imagine this:

Today Google offer a best endeavours YouTube service, over the top of other people’s transit networks; it works okay if your goal is to support three minutes of viewing per day but isn’t good enough for three hours per day. This is at the root of Google’s concerns over Net-Neutrality.

In response, Google launch a Premium YouTube service for a few pounds month but instead of routing the service via an IP-based BGP interface onto your ISP’s network, its routed via an ALA VLAN hand-over point to your network operator. Quality is assured so now you can watch three-hours a day of broadcast quality media, and Google can secure the rights to premium content as the risk of pixelation has been removed and the rights holders can feel confident their brand wont be damaged.

Love Films backed by an ALA-based “Networks as a Service” offering from Amazon Web Services is at least as well placed to be the pioneer, completely demolishing the current rigid assumption that viewing is either linear (broadcast) or non-linear (on-demand); their new streaming package that learns your viewing habits is the first baby step.

Today, this minute, this is a dream – a perfectly feasible dream – but as companies like Love Films evolve their services and they explore, prod and push the capabilities and limitations of the underlying networks then I’m as confident as I can be that it will become a reality. When (not if) an organisation like Amazon Web Services gets their heads around the capabilities of ALA the world will change and imaginations will be unleashed.

Today we have a world of Over the Top (OTT) services – prepare for a world that combines OTT with RTS (round the side) services – and prepare for a future that blows your mind.

If you build your networks without ALA in mind then you are about to condemn your platform to obsolescence and your customers to boredom!

Start developing your networks with a proximity to your customers in mind and you will never look back!

An observation on British broadband #2

Published on May 22, 2011 in Adrian's tech blog. 0 Comments Tags: , , , , , , , .

One of my long-term predictions has been that Service Providers will ultimately disappear as we know them today.

They were a necessary middle-man when we were trying coax our voice-grade network into the internet-era; dial-up internet evolved from banks of modems providing access to bulletin boards and mail hosts to an interconnected inter-net.

Now we are moving towards a network purpose designed for data that treats voice as just another service, there is something of an assumption that ISPs as we have come to know them will remain an important part of the supply chain – the necessary link between retail customers and the telecommunications core.

We can see that evidenced in the EU’s assumption that open access networks will provide multiple layers of competition, and the initial focus of Ofcom’s work began with a replacement for level 2 services which form the basis of today’s ISP services (in fact it doesn’t feel like they’ve moved much beyond level 2 access).

But its worth remembering what happened in the UK when the regulator mandated access to the first-mile copper network, the so called local loop; ISPs rushed to compete at an infrastructure level, not on a virtualised network but using  real networks. It suggests the industries preferred competitive battle-ground and the regulators may not be exactly the same.

In the days of dial-up modems, your ISP provided transit from their network to the internet, your email address and web-space. Today, most people prefer Gmail and consider Facebook their web hosts, leaving ISP’s as little more than resellers of internet transit. No wonder they seeks areas to differentiate!

Returning to today’s next generation transition, there has been a clear reluctance among ISPs to engage and commit to next generation developments. While much of the debate has been on the cost and complexity of creating new software interfaces to manage layer 2 Active Line Access (ALA – what BT calls GEA) services, lying behind this , I suspect, is a deeper preference to find a realistic substitute for local loop unbundling, where ISPs can retain their ability to compete using physical and not virtual networks.

If this is true, then perhaps it should not have been a surprise that the first formal, unequivocal request from a service provider to next generation network builders was for physical network access – Virgin’s offer to use a wavelength to extend their cable coverage to new areas where a full -to-the-premises network exists.

Physical network control provides greater scope to form the service layer in your own image – to differentiate the customer experience, matching it your brand and aims.

While the arguments from the rest of the service provider community for not joining the next generation party have focussed on the complexity of software system interconnection, this is really a facet of the cost and complexity of administering virtual networks – physical network interconnection is typically a much simpler process with fewer variables.

So was the work on ALA a waste?

Absolutely and unequivocally no!

A smart and flexible layer 2 framework is what will release the – the operators. While service providers appear to want to move down the network stack, their place will be filled by application and . The capabilities of a smart will unleash the creativity of social media companies, cloud application developers and the content delivery companies.

ALA should be promoted to Sony and Google as much, if more than, to TalkTalk and Plusnet.

Am I bothered that some next generation networks appear vertically integrated? If their intentions are monopolistic, then very much so. If however, they are creating a platform for services and using ALA to actively encourage new service delivery models, then I’m less concerned – in many ways I suspect they will become the pioneers of a new internet era.

So what is the impact of all this?

If internet service provision does move further towards physical network provisioning, then we need to understand one key message: Who ever lights the service owns the customers and controls their access to the digital world. This is the true root of the debate.

While it is true that whoever builds the passive cabling has a natural geographical monopoly, whoever lights the service has a natural monopoly over people and businesses. That is one of the key strengths of ALA – it breaks the chains, putting control over the digital experience in the hands of customers and the services they value.

In this regard, it perhaps matters less about having a choice over who lights the service but much more important about how they light it. Getting this right will move the internet message away from bits and bytes and towards stuff that matters to us – the services we value.

So for Ofcom, two messages should be very clear:

  1. More progress needs to be made on passive infrastructure access. Its not just about ducts and polls but a passive version of ALA – a consistent framework that allows today’s ISPs to unbundle cables and reinforce their apparent desire to deliver real networks, not virtual.
  2. ALA is a brilliant mechanism but only if its purpose and opportunities are made clear. Whoever lights the cables, should be using ALA, and a new level of service competition should be created where multiple content providers are able to take advantage of the intelligence built into ALA. Ofcom needs to put its long arms around the totality of its remit, and not treat broadband and different in some way to TV or content.

If we can get this right, the UK could become the first country to break the chains of the net neutrality debate and in the process create an exciting platform for the next wave of creative industries and social media. And we will have put to bed one of the key reasons the major ISPs aren’t fully engaging with this future.

Phrenology of the Thinking Cloud

Published on March 6, 2010 in Adrian's tech blog. 0 Comments Tags: , , , , .

When I set out to distil my thoughts on a Thinking it looked like three chunks were going to be enough but by the end of it all there were some loose ends still remaining – the combination of a lot to say, a big subject and perhaps the long-form limitations of a blog format. So here I want to draw together a few of the loose ends and attempt to extract some shape and character from the ramblings so far – hence the pseudo-science of phrenology in the title.

The full potential of cloud computing is immense and will be a bigger revolution than the development of the web – of that I have no doubt. Supporting this change is a cloud infrastructure which is also yet to fully develop. Today it really means little more than storage and processing to support relatively simple application within the web but it will begin to draw in more powerful tools like distributed grid computing, parallelism and utility computing – we’ve seen mere hints of this with programmes like SETI and their screen-saver to crunch massive amounts of astronomical data.

As the cloud becomes more conscious with true cognitive powers to rival the memory it has today, the additional requirements will fall on the cloud network. It will no longer be acceptable for the cloud moniker to simply say “I’m so technical you don’t need to know what’s inside” – it will need to take on many of the characteristics of the infrastructure and more importantly the applications also within the cloud. We saw in Part I what this may mean for applications; in Part II we saw that the capability to link the network to applications exists in 3D networking; and in Part III we looked at how the telecommunications market is beginning to change which may unlock some of this power. But I hadn’t really delved into what that might mean as we move to true cloud networks.

Today’s networks are fairly rigid t0 the descriptions we use reinforce this – the superhighway suggesting massive solid routes offering mass transit which took many years to design and build. And this is not so very far from the truth, and this is where the tension lies. Laying -optic cables in the ground requires long-term utility with deep pockets while cloud computing is rather more darting and changing, and transitory. The two need to be reconciled if the under-pinning networks are to release the true potential of a thinking cloud. And this creates a problem – the proximity to reality.

Applications people find it easy to shape solutions around people because they have a direct communication; database manager and server people find the conversation not too challenging because they have a good proxy through the developers; network people are several layers down and are trying to manage a necessarily shared domain with competing requirements so its easy to see why telecommunications is seen as some how disconnected from people’s day-to-day reality and not always very supportive.

Networks are like Ogre’s, according to Shrek at least, they are made up of layers. While network engineers may wrestle with a whole stack of layers, commercially we have tended to focus on a very narrow subset which fuses together the rest. The business case for networks has always focussed on the degree of interleaving, or contention, which can be achieved – assume, for example, that only one in five people will be on-line at any one time, and that only one in ten of those are generating traffic at any instant while the rest are reading the web page or email that’s just arrived – so a 50:1 contention ratio works for people who browse the web.

This doesn’t work in a thinking cloud – in fact, it doesn’t really work today as streaming, which necessarily demands a 1:1 contention ratio, and more pervasive computing takes hold. Much smarter, more dynamic measures need to evolve – and quickly. The 3D capabilities of provide part of the answer and forge the link between applications and the higher layers of network which will be so critical but it doesn’t address the rather transitory and sometimes sudden demands of bandwidth and routes. New technologies are needed at lower layers which offer the same flexibility we are beginning to see at layer two, through standards like Active Line Access, to will significantly increase the network’s ability to bend and stretch.

Some of these tools are beginning to emerge. Companies like InTune Networks are beginning to release solutions which can do with light what we are beginning to do with virtual networks; wavelengths on demand which are able to respond to the demands of people and the applications they use. In many ways what InTune are creating is “cloud switches” where the switching fabric is dissolved into a cloud of light. Implementing these kinds of tools in the marketplace describe in Part III would unleash wavelengths on demand just as the current plans release VLAN’s on demand. In the future transparent optical cross-connect has the promise of dynamically connecting whole fibres in the way that InTune is able to switch wavelengths. At this point the only rigid element of networks will be the ducts the cables pass through.

As optical technology develops the concept of a cloud network will grow and become more supple. This will result in a network which can morph more easily around people and their demands, and to optimise the capacity at each and every layer. And this in turn means its network managers will be able to sit around the board table and become a constructive part of the business cycle – no longer the group which is too removed from people (not a criticism by the way) and with too many competing demands on their networks to be in a position to offer constructive support.

For countries which get this early the impacts will be huge. New research opportunities in photonics and network design which pioneer new markets; and an economy with much of the rigidity removed, able to draw on the creativity of all its ideas.

The Thinking Cloud – Part III

Published on March 4, 2010 in Adrian's tech blog. 2 Comments Tags: , , , , .

In Part I, the shape of computing was considered and how the metaphor was perhaps not able to encapsulate the scale of change it may bring. Part II began to explore the impact the may have on broadband services; that the evolution view of next generation broadband is largely wrong and will prevent society from realizing the full potential laid out in Part I. In this chapter, I start to look at how the original cloud – the underlying network – will need to change as cloud computing becomes mainstream, and how the telecommunications market will need to reconsider their whole approach.

The first challenge comes from the direction of change. While we are at a point in telecoms where the technology is fundamentally changing, the real change is coming from society and their use of the Internet. I’ve been criticised before, and no doubt what I about to say will annoy some of my telecoms colleagues further, but the industry to date hasn’t been good at relating to people – at understanding what they want and creating base services moulded around them. To far too many telecos, customers are “revenue generating units” (RGU’s); a necessary source of income but something of an irritation to the smooth running of their expensive network. In Part II we considered this in the ways telecos use traffic shaping to minimise the impact of customers, and in the way the market has opted to differentiate its services by little more than brand.

This time however, the change in telecoms is coinciding with fundamental changes in society and its attitude to technology – it would be a brave (stupid?) company that ignored this as they prepare to invest in the most fundamental and expensive change in their industries long history.

In the UK, like many other countries, the telecoms market is fragmenting. It is no longer certain that a single incumbent operator will be the sole supplier of connections into our homes and businesses as a growing number of organisations using a range of technologies and begin to invest in first mile access networks. While its impossible to predict how far this fragmentation will continue, it has become an established fact which creates two key dynamics in the market.

Firstly, at a micro level network owners have to persuade people (not RGU’s) to migrate onto their new, wizzey, and very expensive networks – and that necessitates engaging with customers as never before. Nothing is a substitute for take-up – customers choosing to use your network. But as I demonstrated in Part II, next generation broadband isn’t really about speed – the only message beyond brand typically trumpeted in today’s ISP adverts but this is a message which misses the point of .

To further unsettle the existing world order, the necessarily patchwork deployment of next generation networks means global advertising of nationally available services is no longer a viable model. The industry needs to consider how to deliver a differentiated service set which draws on the true characteristics of their next generation broadband networks, which chimes with societies transforming view of technology, and then they need to find ways to share that message at a local level using local channels rather than national media.

There are two quite contrasting international case studies which can be quite informative here:

  • The first is the well known market town of Nuenen near Eindhoven in The Netherlands; this town has achieved immense take-up levels using very smart marketing techniques which are closely tied to the community. They laid out seven pillars for a successful project where perhaps only three of which a traditional network operator can achieve. The key to their success was community communication, an “us feeling” where the community feels engaged, and a local set of services. Nuenen is an example of how to successfully engage with a community, and it can’t be faked.
  • The second example is Slovenia, a country where the incumbent operator has met with very strong competition from a new entrant. The land confiscated by the communists was returned to the Church who no longer needed it. The money the generated from its sale was invested, at the request of parishioners, in next generation broadband but it was the local links which made it a success. No matter how much money the incumbent could invest in their technology and their traditional marketing message, they found it impossible to compete with locally delivered services which people felt related to them in some way.

The lessons from these two are easy to understand but difficult to implement – how can a major, national company truly engage with a community such that they feel engaged? I offer no answers here, although I am working with a number of organisations to develop models which may balance the economic imperative of a top-down model with the requirement to genuinely engage at a local level. With the progress being made, I hope to be able to add some important case studies here soon which show how macro and the micro business approaches can be married.

The second impact of market fragmentation is macro market co-operation. If customers are to see a wide choice of services with some certainty that they will be able to keep them when they move, network owners will need to co-operate. In many cases, they are individually too small and diverse for national service providers to deal with. Even in the case of some of the larger initiatives, major service providers are concerned that the additional value offered by next generation networks may be small when offset against the cost creating an interface to them.

Conceptually, however, this is the easy bit – something other markets have already dealt with long ago. The industry will need a single wholesale market which delivers two things – a series of aggregation points where service providers can expect to find sufficient potential customers, and a trading system which enables service providers, in the widest sense, to buy the wholesale elements they need to build flexible, differentiated services.

When I first started work on this perhaps three years ago the necessary structure looked strange until I did a search, replacing telecoms assets with widgets or cocoa beans. The problem wasn’t with the concepts but with the way we have become used to seeing the telecoms market with a dominant avuncular incumbent.

There are some details which are tricky, like identifying fungible and liquid assets which can be traded but thankfully this is something which can be solved – rather is being solved. Significant elements of the nascent next generation broadband market have come together to create what is being called – the joint operating network. This programme is in the process of turning the discussions within the Broadband Stakeholder Group’s COTS process together with work of standards organisations like the NICC into an open wholesale market for competitive next generation services.

The potential benefits of this move are immense – a vibrant whole sale market which celebrates differentiation and innovation, which provides customers with choice across the “reach-richness” spectrum, and is able  to do this without the need for an interventionist regulator (there will of course still need to a regulator but one adopting a more auditory role).

So while the UK is still unable to be considered for the Global Fibre to the Home League Table because it doesn’t have the minimum market penetration, there are other structural things being put in place which I hope will help the UK not only accelerate its investment in fibre but perhaps more importantly also optimise the benefits of those investments for the industry, the wider economy and for people.

The Thinking Cloud – Part II

Published on March 1, 2010 in Adrian's tech blog. 2 Comments Tags: .

In the first bit of my ‘Thinking ’, I tried to consider the shape of computing and what it really means – that perhaps the metaphor was being stretched a little too far. In the second part I regroup onto ground closer to my normal stomping ground, and consider what impact the changes in Part I will have on the underlying infrastructure – how will broadband and the need to change to support a “ thinking”.

There is a view that “next generation broadband” is simply an evolution of all that has gone before but I agree with David Brunnen in his recent blog that we aren’t looking at an upgrade – this change is much more fundamental than that.

Ten years ago Evans and Wurster wrote an excellent book, Blown to Bits, looking at some of the reasons the dot.com bubble burst and what strategies could help you survive and prosper. One of the concepts they discuss is how all markets have a trade off between what they call reach and richness – market reach, and the ability to customise and tailor a solution. All businesses sit somewhere along that line with perhaps McDonalds at one end with a global reach bit a low ability to offer you anything other than what’s on their globally fixed menu, and Saville Row tailors at the other end who would find it impossible to become global businesses but can offer you precisely what you want.

Applying this model to telecoms is quite telling – the curve is disjointed, with commodity broadband offerings at one end, then corporate and wholesale products at the other with few if any offering in between.

At the consumer end exists xDSL products where differentiation is limited to little more than brand and contention, while at the other end are wholesale Ethernet products attached to MPLS clouds – and there is almost nothing in between. Not only is this not helpful for customers and large sections of the telecommunications industry, it is no longer necessary – have the capability to break this model, if the market environment is allowed to change with it.

Back in the late 1990′s I did some work on what we called then “3D networks” – network technologies have traditionally been 2D with a trade off between geographical reach and speed – dial-up links can cover great distances but at slow speeds, while the new 100 Gbit Ethernet standard over copper looks set to cover just 10m. This was a useful model when considering copper-based networks but is somewhat pointless for networks since there is a variant of every standard from 100 Mbps to 100 Gbps which is able to cover 40km or more with no signs of abating – the research into terabit Ethernet looks likely to follow the same trend. (note the log scale below)

In next generation fibre networks bandwidth is irrelevant.

The third dimension we considered was policy – the ability to tune and shape the environment to support network users. This becomes informative when contrasting existing infrastructure and next generation technologies – setting aside the arguments for a moment. With the capability to deliver seemingly endless bandwidth but with a richness previously only available to the wholesale and large corporate markets, next generation broadband offerings fundamentally change the shape of the market.

The NICC is currently formalising the Active Line Ethernet standard for networks – this will have at its core requirements to deliver at least four VLAN’s to each customer, currently each with five qualities of service. This shifts broadband environments from monochromatic to having 20 colours in a spectrum. With distance as a barrier removed – the broadband market will never be the same again.

How does this affect “cloud thinking”?

Today’s internet can be a pretty hostile environment for applications. So before we go any further let me tackle the net neutrality debate head on. There is an interesting difference in sentiments between users of corporate networks and the internet. In the corporate world finely tuned 3D networks are a good thing – they ensure applications run optimally and the business runs smoothly. On the internet, traffic shaping is seen a severe curtailment and fundamentally wrong. Why?

Because internet service providers use policy-networking techniques to minimise the impact their customer have on their expensive networks. This is fundamentally bad and I fall 100% behind the supporters of net neutrality – today.

However, there is a fundamental difference in NGA, or at least the way the UK is approaching it. With at least four VLAN’s, your ISP can’t monopolise your access to the IP world – you have choice. Today if a media company is as unhappy as you are about the way their video streams are tuned down, there is very little they can do about it – in an NGA world, they can simply choose to by-pass the internet.

And this will happen – the world of service providers is about to become a whole lot richer – it will no longer be synonymous with internet service providers. They will be joined by games service providers, healthcare service providers, and a whole raft of others.

How do I know this isn’t just a pipe dream? Content delivery networks (CDN’s) are rapidly becoming the biggest international transit companies, over taking many traditional internet transit companies. The customers of CDN’s are the same media and cloud computing companies that are impacted by today’s ISP policies. These companies are seeing their brand value tarnished and their business opportunities curtailed – if they could bypass the internet and form a relationship with you directly they would. NGA networks allow them.

So just as we start to consider a thinking cloud, we can also begin to consider a network environment able to support and nurture it. In the past, the network architect was often the expensive nay-sayer – with bandwidth no longer a barrier and networks able to be conscious of users and their applications, in this world network architects will become an essential part of the creative process.

In the next part I start to explore what happens within the original cloud as we see it soften its edges and become more nebulous and adaptable.

The Thinking Cloud – Part I

Published on February 28, 2010 in Adrian's tech blog. 0 Comments Tags: .

In the beginning network architects created the – an amorphous blob which sat between people and data-centres on every network diagram. But this analogy was little more than a pictogram embossed on the rather solid lid of a box marked “telecommunications” – inside this box was a rather solid, reliable and esoteric formation which belies the fluffy, nebulous metaphor.

Undeterred further clouds have appeared in our virtual sky – cloud computing, and now Charlie Leadbeater’s “Cloud Culture”. It was hearing Charlie Leadbeater presenting his booklet to a British Council’s Counterpoint audience that it became apparent that what was being described was, while unsurprisingly expertly argued, somehow insufficient – the cloud metaphor was showing its age. What was being described was exciting and I have no doubt is a very real taste of what is to come – but I suspect (hope) there is so much more to it.

A cloud is amorphous, changing, sometimes supporting choirs of angels, and sometimes a portent of storms – and sometimes it’s a fog which masks what lies beneath. That’s how network engineers use it, to mask the complexity beneath, and I fully expect that cloud computing and its associated culture is, accidentally, doing the same thing.

So as the fog begins to clear, what might we expect to find?

It was explained to me as a child that we as individuals do not have knowledge but that we each have a window into a philosophical knowledge cloud – perhaps the first metaphorical cloud – that we are bathed in a collective, universal, shared knowledge. But looking back this is a rather arrogant perspective; that we mortals are bathed in the light of the luminaries, and that adding to and maintaining knowledge is the preserve of academics, those with doctor or professor prefixing their names, publishing work in books and peer reviewed journals.

If this was ever the case, it was because publishing was only available to the few – it’s an expensive and time consuming business which naturally creates an elite. So it’s clear that, if this were ever true, it arose from restrictions in our collective ability to communicate sufficiently widely, and that all of us have the capability to both bathe in and add to the body of a universal knowledge cloud if these restrictions were removed. The has removed those restrictions for many of us – the cloud supports our collective ability to converse with knowledge rather than simply consume – we can conduct light and shine at the same time.

The premise of a thinking cloud is a key reason why the metaphor is, for me at least, no longer quite sufficient. This amorphous entity has a consciousness – the ability to think and alter our individual perspective on the world, and add to our universal understanding. It has a conscience and emotions, and the ability to not just store knowledge but also create change – to process and act.

The cloud is increasingly looking like a collective brain – people forming nuggets of thought, the neurons, and the internet offering the ability to communicate those ideas, the synapses; together they form ideas and capabilities much larger than any individual. Cloud computing as it’s popularly presented is little more than a collective memory with the ability to rapidly communicate updates – it’s much, much more than that.

It’s a place where new ideas come into being which requires intelligence – the internet is no longer just a place to look things up – it’s a place to do things. Cloud computing takes the processing out of the data centre and isolated PC, turning it into a collective, shared cognitive experience.

Tools like Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn simply allow us to test and renew those synapses – keeping the ability to think and process fresh and evolving. The 1.3m followers of Stephen Fry aren’t his friends – but they do form a variety of links to the real world. Anthropologists suggests we can’t cope with more than perhaps 150 real friends; the remainder are made up of a spectrum of loose acquaintances, general followers, and plain and simple voyeurs. But over time these links to individuals will be promoted and relegated just as the synapses in a brain form and weaken depending on how often they are used and how relevant they are. Learning how to manage our synapses will become a critical skill as we progress towards a thinking cloud.

So far technology has to a large extent pandered to our insecurities – deep down we didn’t really want to work three days a week – we wanted to make sure we were in control and in touch with everything that goes on around us. So technology hasn’t made life easier, as we said, but far more communicative, as we wanted. This pressure is rapidly pushing us towards information overload – or as Brian Condon puts it, the point of maximum confusion from which order and new ideas can be formed. Learning how to maintain the right links and being comfortable allowing them to change over time, will not only keep us sane but will allow us to see order and new possibilities in a thinking cloud.

Until now new ideas came from where people could meet – coffee shops in 18th century London and 20th century California. This associative behaviour was necessarily geographically confined. The thinking cloud removes the shackles and will unleash one of the most creative ages in our (I hope!).

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