hitting the wire*

wouldn't it be nice?

One of the perks of working at an ISP and getting in to work early in the morning is experiencing the raw, unfettered power of phat bandwidth.  The kind of stuff Americans have with their coffee @ Starbucks I imagine?

I've been putting off upgrading my Acrobat Reader.  Today when the upgrade suggestion popped up I thought "what the hell".  Hardly had time to swallow my coffee and more than 20MB had arrived on my desktop.  Won't it be great when bandwidth is so damn cheap and plentiful most of us will be used to this over DSL? :)

(OK, so we have choked the Storm office access to avoid the unintentional pillaging of bandwidth during office hours - "family hold back" and all that, but still, this is what broadband should be!)

More on "Unbundling the Local Loop" (ULL)

According to Tim (Storm's joint CEO), it was while listening to a story on bipolar mania on Cape Talk that Lindsay from Cape Talk called him to ask him if he'd be prepared to go on air with Mike Wills (no, I'm not mistaken - he really was on air - standing in for John Maytham).  Tim deftly tossed the ball to the first person he thought of... me.  So, while preparing to recount my lifelong experience with bipolar mania, I was somewhat flummoxed to have Mike Wills announce he wanted me to explain what "unbundling the local loop" was!

(ok, I jest - at least about the being flummoxed part - Tim would be quite adept at talking about mania's of any sort! ;)  More of that I am sure when his own blog goes live (oops... there goes the cat!)

Here is a copy of the interview if you're interested.

And I sincerely trust, Mr Halse, that I'm more coherent here than I was in the Business Day article!

That's me. More or less unbundled.

This is what the DoC define as "urgent"?!

The Minister of Communications presented her budget speech yesterday.  I had not had sight of it and had consumed a few glasses of Bloemendal red wine (not to mention sampled a good others) at the ISPA dinner when I was asked for comment by Business Day.  Needless to say, I was not very coherent. 

Much was said, and although there has been movement in certain areas - most notably the eventual promulgation of the EC Act, very little tangible progress has been made on lowering the costs of telecoms and stimulating the growth of broadband.

She uses feel-good extracts from the President's State of the Nation address, but neglects to mention that in a recent interview with the Financial Times of London he said:

"The cost of telecommunications is unbelievably high"

She focuses on unbundling of the local loop (ULL), and states that it is "urgent":

"I HAVE ALSO TAKEN THE POLICY DECISION that, given the complexity of local loop unbundling process on the one hand and the urgency for South Africa to enable all operators appropriately licensed to have access to the local loop on the other, the unbundling process in South Africa should be urgently implemented."

but then states:

"The unbundling process should be completed by 1 November 2011."

I think that sums up the problem for me.  4.5 years is considered "urgent".  What makes it more interesting, is that the process ICASA is pursuing with some uncharacteristic and laudable speed, being the definition of markets, and promulgation of regulations on interconnect and facilities leasing will effectively unbundle the local loop long before 2011 if the process is not derailed.

I wonder how "Accelerated" is defined (as in ASGISA)?  But then if you're starting from a low speed, any increase in forward movement can be defined as "acceleration".

The local loop is indeed one of the bottlenecks in introducing relatively unfettered competition into the SA market, and if the DoC have realised that, it is a positive thing.  However it is realised, it is needed now, not in 2011.

I must remember to revisit this at the end of 2007 and rate progress.

IT & Telecoms trends in 2007

At the beginning of March I was asked to distil my thoughts on what trends are likely to emerge during 2007/2008 in the local Information & Communications Technology market. I’ve held back on posting until now while Storm's overworked Marketing team get the customer newsletter out to avoid stealing all their thunder. As usual, this is a mix of “duh, of course, like that's news?” type stuff and some “what are you smoking!?” ideas that may well be way off the mark! Here goes:

Obviously the desktop hardware technology “refresh” will get going as IT budgets are approved and laptop and desktops using Intel’s new super fast core 2 duo chip’s start hitting corporate desks in earnest; followed closely by the early adopters of Microsoft’s much awaited new operating system ‘Vista’. (The more cautious of us will wait for Service Patch 1 or even 2 to appear!)

On the bandwidth front - Broadband, now far from broad, will continue to drop in price, but I doubt as much as we have seen in the last 18 months. I can't even recall who started the argy-bargy, but at one stage MTN appeared to have created a new benchmark at around R0.20/MB. It was allegedly intended to be a limited duration half-price special, but showed what could be done.  Sentech announced they planned providing more bang for buck;  Vodacom then dropped their price (by 61% according to their ads) after being almost double everyone else’s price. iBurst also dropped their pricing, but remain more expensive than Sentech for equivalent packages (sub HSDPA theoretical speeds). The unlicensed players like Amobia and Uninet are still an order of magnitude cheaper but don’t have the coverage advantage. It is all a bit confusing for the man in the street, but ultimately these changes will make getting online and staying there permanently, more affordable. Offerings should start to differentiate on quality (reliability of throughput) and you should be able to get fixed IP addresses – currently not available to ADSL users. This will facilitate hooking up remote offices for voice and data over IP.

More telco’s will announce moves to converge their voice and data networks onto IP based New Generation Networks like British Telecom’s 21st Century Network project. This will make networks more intelligent and flexible, but will unfortunately not impact on customers for some time to come.

Video on Demand is growing overseas (where real broadband exists) – people are prepared to pay a premium over the likes of Mr Video et al to choose their viewing for the evening from their armchair. Don’t hold your breath here – we’re too spread out geographically to make it profitable just yet (maybe satellite will save us). And Telkom still dominates the local loop.

IPTV is being touted by vendors as the next big thing. Again, dependent on broadband, and ownership of content will be key! It will not be over the Internet, but over managed IP networks.

Music and video downloads, both legal and illegal, continue to grow. More cell phones with better mp3 players will eventually make people wonder why they have a CD player, but probably not this year! Apple’s iPhone will develop a cult following but will hardly make a dent in Nokia’s global market dominance.

Instant Messaging (IM) will continue to grow. Local mobile phone based instant messaging service, MXIT (Think MSN messenger on your phone) will find ways of “growing up” and becoming more respectable. IM will start making deeper inroads into corporate culture with IT managers needing to develop policies on IM usage.

WiMAX equipment will drop in price as the economies of scale kick in and more networks other than Sprint Nextel in the USA do mass roll-outs. It will continue to disappoint those who believed all the hype w.r.t. 70Mbps @ 70 miles @ 70mph. Some Meshed WiFi networks will appear here in SA, whether legal or not, and we’ll continue to see a LAN technology play in open spaces it was never intended for. Unlicensed Mobile Access, with VoWiFi phones following along behind, causing Mobile Networks to get edgy.

Spectrum is being fiercely fought over. It is a scarce resource and it is unlikely that anyone other than a few established players will get licenses. There will be many frustrated wannabes.

Municipal networks are coming to the fore, with the Cape Town tender awarded, but challenged, eThekweni ready to roll but caught up with legalities, and City of Joburg now out on tender. They are unlikely to have any real impact this year. They do not really have much of a sustainable advantage in the long run, as they will have to allow others access to infrastructure and will find that building a telco is not trivial.

The Mobile networks will announce HSUPA with great fanfare. Mobile broadband will then be about as broad as it gets for a while, but as up- and down-load speeds will be around 5Mbps, it will make quadplay (or fourplay?) possible – mobile/voice/internet/video.

Mobile interconnect prices are due to come down by 20 to 25% shortly. This should allow Telkom to drop the price of calls to mobile phones – whether they will pass on the full benefit or not will have to be seen. Mobile packages are unlikely to change as a result though. Least Cost Routing will become more and more marginal and the shift to Communication Service Providers using VoIP will be become more obvious.

Asterisk, the open source “IPPBX” will continue to make some serious inroads into the PBX market, with damage being done at a “higher level” in the market than originally proposed – medium to large corporates instead of SME’s. Watch the call centres here – they’re the weather vane of change.

Hosted IPPBX’s will start emerging as broadband improves and investors in some of the early VoIP entrants who committed large capex in these sorts of solutions seek to get ROI moving.

Social Networking using web based applications like MySpace, YouTube, Flickr, blogs, Second Life etc will become more widely known and used as people get used to being online 24*7. We’re seeing South African flavours of these appearing.

DSL and SSL VPN’s will become more popular as DSL prices drop and quality improves and mobile broadband grows. Business will seek help to set up and manage increasingly complex networks of devices.

As broadband improves in throughput, price and reliability, ASP services will become more popular, with companies seriously considering (but possibly not committing to just yet) such things as Getting Things Done, Gmail and Office packages from the likes of Google rather than Microsoft (from one evil empire to another!?).

VoIP will start emerging as more than just a cost saving exercise with some of the first real value adds starting to come through, with integration into calendars, address books, CRM’s and PBX’s.

There will be a lot of consolidation in the next few years, with bigger players buying smaller, more niche players to fulfill the need to have broader voice and data offering.

Oh, and Neotel will start taking on Telkom in the retail market and Infraco will make its clumsy and controversial way onto the stage…

(and if I look back on my 2006 predictions... if we see half of these during 2007, we'll be doing well! :( )

Dave Gale

March 2007

VoIPTopia - when VoIP gets funky.

When it comes to VoIP, we've all got a bit fixated on the means to the end instead of the end itself, which is to make communications not just cheaper (a definite fixation here in SA), but easier and more productive. VoIP is a technology.  Actually it is a protocol, which in turn is only a predetermined method of communications between devices. 

This post is long overdue and I apologise to those who had given up hope of me ever providing a version of the animation we used at the SA Broadband Summit in Feb this year.  Truth is, I've been busy and I couldn't get the HTML right first go.  I've finally hacked it (helps to follow the programmer's instructions to the letter!)

Here it is, a maybe not so futuristic view of what (Vo)IP can enable for the knowledge worker.  There is much it can do for the consumer, but that is another story.  If it seems the narrative is a bit rushed, it is; MeshSmith, the animator, begged me to cut it as short as possible - after all I did give him an impossible deadline - which he made.  Hit the play button below and adjust the sound for optimal listening pleasure! ;)

that's me.  and no one yelled "fore!" dammit!

Is this war? Broadband(ish) style

 

Few things ruin your evening relaxing at a 5–star guest house in a lush Westville suburb (if you travel to Durban on business… there is no place like Ntengu Lodge – service as it should be defined at prices you pay at City Lodge!) like getting a call from SAfm’s AMLive to ask if you’ll comment at 06h35 next morning on Vodacom’s recent broadband price reductions (eh?  I thought it was MTN dropping prices?!).  Shove a microphone or camera at me and my palms wet themselves!  Not quite sure where they got the idea that Storm is a telecoms analysis outfit… need to work on our branding more! :/

So, armed with my HSDPA card and my coal-powered laptop, I started to catch up on recent events, but not before I’d asked Sentient to do some research.  Amazing how quickly one can assimilate info with an pseudo-broadband IP connection!  (please… you cannot call sub 2Mbps true broadband)

Is it a price war or not?  Opinions seem to be divided.  Roger from Sentient:

It may or may not be a price war... but if it walks like a duck, quacks like a duck and looks like a duck, there is a reasonable chance it's a waterfowl of species anatidae

I tend to agree, but then what is the difference between a brief skirmish and a full out war?  The determination to hold one’s position?  What difference will this make to consumers?  With all the recent jockeying, there is a lot of confusion over the various offerings.  MyADSL is always a good source of info on local broadband as Rudolf and his merry mates are fixated on it.  Yes, yes, I know… that why it is actually called MyADSL!

I have no idea if Telkom are going to fire a retaliatory broadside and turn this into a real firefight.  History leads me to doubt it.  But if they don’t, they will lose business to HSDPA, iBurst and MyWireless.  Even with self-install as an option, it is easier (and cheaper) to sign up for wireless.  Cheaper despite the fact that wireless networks are more expensive to deploy.  And don’t forget that the most of the copper has been in the ground way past its ROI period.  I certainly hope Telkom retaliates.

But price is only one aspect.  I want DSL that doesn’t fall asleep on the job, like some Cabinet Ministers we know.  Let’s see some differentiation on contention ratios for a start.  And I still have to hear when we’re going to get access to some of the fibre that is supposedly being force fed down cable ducts… <sigh>

Anyway, all this got me wondering how one can compare the various offerings so I took a stab at creating a graphic to make it a bit easier (click on the thumb-nail below).  I’m not convinced I shouldn’t have opted for bars of some sort, but after giving up on the bubble representation on the data in Excel, I resorted to creating a balloon farm of my own.  Let me know if you spot some errors. And lets have some bright spark track down a Web2.0 app we can hook up to MyADSL and make some sense of it all.

That’s me.

ps.  Joe has just chastised me (and rightly so) that I’ve left out Amobia and Uninet.  An oversight I will address after I’ve had some sleep!

Madam Minister, what were you thinking?!

There are times when politicians say the damnedest things.  Sometimes they are actually intelligent things.  Most of the time (as was observed by one wit in the chamber the other day) one could make use of the resulting hot air to help Eskom out of their energy crisis.  And then there are times when comments are made that are breathtakingly and gob-smackingly straight from the other side of Lewis Carrol’s looking glass!

If the report in ICT World which came out on Friday is correct, our Minister of Telecommunications is either highly disingenious, badly informed or ignorant of her own affairs (and as I have yet to renew my subscription to the Parliamentary Monitoring Group, I cannot verify her words). In a parliamentary briefing last week she allegedly excused the poor progress that the country is making toward market reform in Telecoms, and the desired drop in the price of telecommunications on the private sector.  Apparently we are “not coming to the party” on Self-Provisioning and VoIP among others.

This after ICASA, the industry and a good few telecoms lawyers interpreted her September 2004 statement as allowing VANS to self provide, which she then changed her mind on one day before the 1 February 2005 effective date.

ISPA have quite rightly called for clarification, and if the Vodacom fellow I was sitting next to on the plane to Joburg tonight is correct, she may have meant the Mobile Network Operators when she talked about Self Provisioning… but then, why didn’t she say so?  And aren’t they still waiting for spectrum?

And VoIP?  I thought things were rolling along very nicely thank you!  At least they are in our neck of the woods.  But VoIP and Broadband are tied at the hip in many respects and broadband is… well, not very broad and then when it looks that way, it suddenly shrinks again without notice.  And the ADSL regulations that came out last year from ICASA were not very helpful and have no implementation schedule attached…

You could start with a Broadband Policy?  Oh, you’re too busy working with the DPE to build the broadband network to solve all our problems? 

And if you don’t mind me asking, what exactly were you expecting Ma’am? We’ve yet to see some real leadership, clear policy and directives coming out of DoC.  If you keep making ambiguous statements and then retracting/correcting them with equally ambiguous statements… we’ll just have to “kyk noord en f** voort” neh?

aluta continua.

VoIPTopia at Broadband Summit 2007

I’m presenting at Broadband Summit 2007 on Tuesday 27^th Feb (next week).  The title is “VoIPTopia” a concept that Sarah Rice and I developed (OK, so she suggested it and then watched in amusement while I got carried away and went MontyPythonesque). We started to think about ‘OK, so we’re doing VoIP. It works. The environment is a bit restricting. Now what?’  So we decided to go right over the top. Indulge the secret SciFi wannabe in each of us.  Go Shatner, go Skywalker, go Buzz Lightyear, <sound effects please> …!

What if the environment was conducive to VoIP-to-the-max?  What if we all got really creative and leveraged the power of IP?  Where it was no longer a world of “so, how much will this VoIP dingus save us eh?”, but where VoIP is used because the quality is better and it enables us to be so much more creative with our communications. 

 

 VoIPTopia was born.

I’ll make the .ppt and the associated movie clips (yeah, we really did go OTT) available here after the 27^th (if you checked the link above you will have noticed the entry fee is just short of the GDP of a small country).  Adam Lange of SignPost has put together an really cool intro.  Andrew Bayley of Quirk succeeded in trimming it down to a barely emailable size (had to sacrifice a but of quality, but all in the interests of fun!  ) and Adrian Berger (aka Meshsmith) worked 24*7 to meet my ridiculous deadline despite trashing his hard drive and RAM on the way to create the cartoon of a dude called Dave, living and working in VoIPTopia.

Thanks guys – will give you some feedback after Tuesday.  I can just hear “Thunderguts” from “Men from the Ministry” (for those of you old enough to remember lying on the lounge carpet listening to Springbok Radio) yelling “AND DON’T MAKE A MUCK OF IT!”

that’s me.

the trouble with toyi-toyi'ing

We South Africans seem to have a terrible passive aggressive tendency.  "Hell, this sucks -somebody should do something about it!" I hear this often in various forms and in various forums.  But just ask someone to join you in doing something tangible, concrete, significant or practical, that involves commitment on their part and... ppfffff... they deflate and sidle off. 

Most recent: someone in the ISP industry complained on a local forum mailing list about a certain locally based spammer (http://www.epasella.com/) who it seems remains unrepentant and unresponsive to complaints.  A number of people added their voices to the bitching session.  A plan of action which involves a bit of effort to test the ECT Act, and create a precedent by throwing the book at the guy is suggested.  Ah no! - much easier to continue do what we're all doing and hunker down behind our spam filters and let unscrupulous "marketers" (blech!) flood our abundant bandwidth (huh?!) with junk mail.  SEP.  Someone Else's Problem.  OK, so a few hardly souls did later step up to the mark 'offlist' and agreed to take action. If you're prepared to do - let me know.  If you receive spam from a local spammer - I'm keen to know who are the worst offenders out there - tell me!

Most common:  Bash Telkom in each and every forum about prices, crap service and poor broadband.  They are a product of their environment - why blame a monopoly for acting like a monopoly?  Do you blame and elephant for being an elephant?  Ask anyone to help you lobby Government to change the environment Telkom lives in... aish!  SEP.  By the way - if you think it is easy to be a good telco - think again.  I predict there will come a time shortly when Big Bad Telkom looks surprisingly good at what it does.  (Ouch- it hurts to write that!)

Less toyi-toyi and more action.