Tag Archive for 'net neutrality'

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.

National legislation with global impacts

Published on January 19, 2012 in Adrian's tech blog. 2 Comments Tags: , , , , , , , , , .

The blackout by many of the big names in response to proposed US legislation isn’t the first time law makers and pioneers have faced up to each other, and its also not the first time that national legislation, attempting to target a national issue, has had potentially significant impacts on the running of the international .

Almost exactly a year ago I wrote about the being posed by the US proposal for a domestic “Internet kill switch“; if the US Government were to switch off the US portions of the Internet it would not just deny UK citizens access to common services but may also kill entire portions of the UK’s internet access because of the global nature of internet peering.

There is no simple answer to this. Of course national Governments must act in their own self-interests but when it comes to the Internet the impact is seldom felt by local citizens alone. , thus far, has been largely successful in developing a fairly egalitarian, global phenomenon outside of national governance but we are entering a new world where national security, health and prosperity depend on the future running of the Internet – this makes it politically very important, not least to key knowledge economies like the UK.

US citizens have typically been more aware of this than many other nations – the importance of net-neutrality is a deeply emotional, heart-felt thing in the US but has so far been largely missed by UK citizens and is totally ignored in Ireland where the lack of transparency is actively marketed by the largest operator.

The reaction to the Internet blackout in response to the US proposals was interesting. It seemed to mark the awakening of debate beyond the US. I didn’t hear much from politicians outside of the US but the interest from commentators went beyond simply bemoaning that they couldn’t look things up on Wikipedia. When Jonathan Agnew from BBC’s Test Match Special comments about the importance of the internet and the problems that may introduce on Twitter, then it must have become mainstream.

My own position is that while copyright of course needs to be protected, the ramifications of any loosely drafted legislation can have far wider impacts, and the implementation of internet legislation specifically will always have implications far beyond national boundaries. Any Government considering a move like this today has a responsibility to world citizens and not just the self-interests of one sector of their local economy.

Today requires a generation of Internet-savvy politicians who can find new world solutions to old world problems like copyright.

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 Ireland

Published on May 21, 2011 in Adrian's tech blog. 0 Comments Tags: , , , , , .

At a conference this week I saw a slide which provided a league table of countries according to some measure of , and it showed Ireland as being some places ahead of the UK – albeit with both languishing in the lower ranks. Mmmm I thought – doesn’t really tally with my by experiences. When over in Dublin recently I managed to upset over a comment I made on Twitter – thankfully no super injunction in place so it went no further!

Eircom’s current adverts promote “next generation broadband” but when you look at the detail its “up to 8 Mbps” – Ireland’s next generation broadband is the same speed as the UK has had for quite a few years on the surface of it (except its a lot more expensive!). So how do Eircom justify the monika “next generation”?

Eircom have invested in their core network and to overcome congestion they’ve added traffic shaping and quality of service techniques – this is their “next generation”.

This got me thinking about how different people in different places and cultures view things. In Ireland Eircom is presenting a heavily shaped network as a bonus – as next generation – yet the same action in America would have called people onto the streets waving placards decrying the end of and the imposition on their human rights.

I’ve not seen what regime they’ve employed to reduce congestion – given its a finite pipe, if something is protected, something else must be squeezed so somebodies traffic isn’t as good as it once was. Whether this matters, technically, is unclear – its perfectly possible to demote email and ftp traffic, where response times are measured in minutes, to provide a better browsing and real-time experience, where response times are measured in milliseconds. But if they’ve unilaterally demoted Skype and VoIP to protect voice revenues then its bad – very bad – or demoted P2P simply because they’ve made the sweeping assumption that all peer-to-peer traffic is illegal music downloading then its stupid and bad.

Whether this matters ethically is a different matter. That Americans come onto the streets and the British grumble into their cornflakes (in our own reserved way that’s quit a statement!) suggests that at a minimum its deeply questionable. Moves towards transparency in the UK would mean that Eircom would at least have to make it clear were they delivering services in Britain – a move in the right direction at least – and perhaps Eircom should consider putting a clear statement on their adverts and website about the precise nature of their shaping – what works well and what is being degraded.

The motive behind Eircom’s move is the lack of investment they’ve been able to make in recent years – Eircom’s really is a sad case study in a privatisation process gone wrong. Hopefully things will begin to improve as they restructure under new ownership but there is a question about whether its too late – the effort they will need to put in to catch-up will be immense.

During my trip I also saw lots of white vans working behalf of UPC, the main operator in Ireland. They were everywhere, ripping out old, low-grade coax and installing what looked to me to be some of the highest gauge coax I’ve ever seen being installed for domestic TV. After many years of mediocre  services, Ireland is starting to see an investment which should put that behind them. Coax of that gauge means UPC appear to be taking few chances that any customer will experience anything other than the advertised broadband speed and over time I’d expect that to rise northwards of 100 Mbps – only a fibre to the home (not cabinet or curb) infrastructure could compete (if Eircom were investing).

The implications of these two snapshots is intriguing. Could we soon see an incumbent telephone company relegated to the position of lowest-common denominator, catch-all service while the cable operator snaffles the premium top-spot? For UPC that can be nothing but good – lots of high-revenue, low cost customers in leafy Dublin 4 and beyond.

For Eircom that should be the warning they need – if the story is allowed to play out to its natural conclusion, they will be left with the high-cost, low revenue customers in the rural west of Ireland – the farms isolated at the far end of a grass-topped boreen. The loss of net neutrality isn’t a substitute for investment in the access network.

Why Sony needs the British

Published on May 10, 2011 in Adrian's tech blog. 0 Comments Tags: , , , , .

Sony’s well reported problems with the PlayStation Network are costing the company dear – but there is a solution to hand!

When the UK approached next generation it could never have been accused of rushing at it – we’ve taken our time, analysed every possibility and then thought about it a bit more. Something that has frustrated just about everyone but it sometimes feels like we’re just built that way.

The up-side of this is that we will be deploying one of the best thought out networks anywhere in the world, and one of the things that sets us aside is ALA – Active Line Access – the method of connecting service providers with customers.

How does this help Sony?

Today the Playstation Network is a network of people – at a technology layer its just a bunch of servers open to the public no different to any website. In an ALA world, the PSN could become a real network – a private tunnel between Sony’s servers in Sony’s data-centres and gamers across the UK.

  • It would no longer be open to the public internet so less hackable
  • It could be quality assured – latency and jitter controlled – making game play seamless and trouble-free while solving any worries
  • DRM type issues would be privately managed without getting in the way of customers enjoyment.

In an ALA world, Internet Service Providers are arguably the least interesting of a range of possible parallel service providers – providers of health, education, media and gaming – in fact, the only limit is our .

So Sony could do a lot worse than talk to British network strategists – we may be little slower to act than some but we’re very good!

By the way – the same advice is offered to Google, Spotify, Last.fm, Skype, Amazon and its , Xbox Live, . . . . .

Homework: read the ALA documents

Published on February 1, 2011 in Adrian's tech blog. 2 Comments Tags: , , , , , , .

I received an email this week from the NICC’s Ethernet Working Group with links to the finalised Active Line Access (ALA) document. This is very exciting for all sorts of reasons.

ALA is the industry agreed model designed specifically for the next generation world, and at any number of levels it fundamentally changes the way will work in the the UK.

The documents are not an easy read (this is, after all, a set of engineering standards designed to be implemented by engineers) but its impact should be understood by everyone who has an opinion on the future shape of broadband, the or .

I attended some of the early meetings as an observer and because, like any opinionated techy, I wanted to help shape some of the early aspects. The Ethernet Working Group under Chris Gallon’s chairmanship is something of a technical dream team – they are the deeply technical architects and engineers from the major vendors and key network operators tasked with working out how their organisations can interoperate.

The work they have done is undoubtedly impressive – they have taken diverse standards from the Broadband Forum, the Metro Ethernet Forum and other standards bodies from around the world and carefully and creatively sewn them together into a single framework which unlocks the potential of next generation broadband across a wide range or network architectures and technologies.

Whether you opt for , point to point ethernet or VDSL from a cabinet, ALA works and can hand over a connection in a seamless and universally consistent way to a service provider. And I see few reasons why it wouldn’t also work for many wireless technologies based around Ethernet and supporting VLAN’s.

Now this brilliant piece of work is published, we have a duty to understand what is possible and to start to consider what is desirable. It is no longer reasonable to opine on net neutrality or the future of the internet without properly appreciating the impact of this work.

If you are a community, commercial organisation or public body thinking of building a network under the framework you will need to be open access – by law – and that means you need to understand ALA – no if, no buts.

So before you say another word on any of this, and you are of a technical bent, your homework is to read it!

If you aren’t technical, turn to your favourite geek and do them a favour – tell them to read it and explain what its all about.

The documents are published on the NICCs website:

Nextgen neutrality moves the debate forward

Published on November 22, 2010 in Adrian's tech blog. 0 Comments Tags: , , , .

The social media channels have been abuzz with debate about and the comments of , the Minister for Communications and Creative Industries. His view that trying to prevent service providers from tinkering with traffic maybe akin to King Canute has more than a little merit. A cursory read of Samknows own report into the quality of (rather than the Ofcom report based on the same data) begins to shed light on the range and depth of techniques service providers use to manage their customer’s use.

Being a supporter of the principal of a neutral and accepting that it may be very difficult to achieve are not necessarily mutually exclusive positions – in fact its probably realistic rather than idealistic.

I would go further – trying to create rules which require regulating the configuration of commercial companies complex networks is probably futile. No sooner would a rule be made than a clever ploy found to subvert it. A real world example of the Queen of Hearts – running ever faster just to stand still.

Far better is to shape the commercial landscape such that its not profitable to mess around with customers online experience – or to only do it in support of the customer. And its this that the UK is doing.

Led by Ofcom and adopted by the industry through the NICC, the UK’s next generation connectivity models will create a broadband market which should lead to a market where customers have choices and service providers will need to compete in a more open manner.

The UK has paved that way to shift net neutrality to a more nuanced and mature level through industry standards.

The Active Line Access (ALA) standard adopted by industry requires next generation network owners to provide multiple virtual networks to each home and business – only one of which is likely to be an ISP.

ALA - not over the top

While today if a content company isn’t happy about their treatment by ISP’s there’s little they can do about it but on UK , they have the option to take one of the additional virtual networks to deliver their service directly to customers “around the side” rather than “over the top” of the ISP.

When she was at Ofcom, Chi Onwurah championed this, and I was more than happy to support her efforts as the NICC started to formalise the ALA standard. The now member of parliament for Central Newcastle, I think saw this as a way of delivering healthcare and government services (which it is and Martha Lane-Fox would do well to understand the importance of that) but it also means if Google don’t like the way Youtube is treated they could launch a service to deliver it through a VLAN which doesn’t go anywhere near a best endeavours internet service. Similarly for games companies, TV aggregators like Project Canvas/Youview, and so on.

Such commercial pressure, where ISPs can no longer monopolise customers’ access to the online world, should start to encourage them to be more supportive of customers choices or risk losing the rich media customers value. If valued content begins find alternative routes to customers’ screens, ISPs will be reduced to mere resellers of other people’s transit – the catch all service for the less used and less valued content.

As the JON Exchange moves closer to our go live data, we’re at pains to make sure this feature is built into from day one – there is already interest from games companies and we are developing relationships with healthcare companies. In the UK, through us at least, the term Service Provider won’t necessarily be simply synonymous with Internet Service Provider.

The pilots would be a lot more interesting (not that they’re not already very interesting) if other Government departments would commit to piloting services over the projects. The NHS should be planning to pilot healthcare over a virtual network connected to the NHS network so the elderly or chronically ill could stay in their homes longer, or the Department of Education planning to offer virtual networks to children on free school meals in the pilot areas so all children have access to the learning platform at home (this reaches a significant part of the 30% Martha Lane-Fox it trying to address while looking to save money on service delivery).

By Government demonstrating leadership in this, it could light the way for private sector companies to launch their own services, pioneering a UK market where net neutrality is encouraged by commercial realities rather than blunt regulation.

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