SMART Letter #68
Packet Relay Radio to the Rescue
March 17, 2002
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SMART Letter #68 -- March 17, 2002
Copyright 2002 by David S. Isenberg
isen.com -- "No taste for accounting"
isen@isen.com -- http://isen.com/ -- 1-888-isen-com
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CONTENTS
> Nine States Have Barriers to Publicly Owned Telecom
> Quote of Note: Bill Gates on 802.11
> Packet Relay Radio to the Rescue!
> Quote of Note: Michael Swaine on the DMCA
> Quote of Note: Steve Talbot on Evil
> Quote of Note: Fred Knight on IP PBXes
> Conferences on my Calendar
> Copyright Notice, Administrivia
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NINE STATES HAVE BARRIERS TO PUBLICLY OWNED TELECOM
by David S. Isenberg
Communications technologies continue to improve despite the
telecom recession. As the gap widens between what is
possible and what is deployed, the threat to established
business models grows accordingly. The Incumbent Local
Exchange Carriers (ILECs) and their allies in the
publishing/entertainment industry and other sectors must
fight harder and harder to preserve the technological
underpinnings of their old business.
The Tauzin-Dingell DSL non-competition bill is an example
of such a hold-back-the-future battle. Fortunately, it is
likely to die in the U.S. Senate. Senator Hollings,
chairman of the Senate's Commerce Committee, vividly
described the bill's purpose in a Senate speech on February
25, 2002:
"Hailed as a way to enhance competition, it eliminates
it. Touted as a way to enhance broadband communications,
it merely allows the Bell companies to extend their
local monopoly into broadband."
Despite the anticipated death of Tauzin-Dingell, the
network of the future has few friends in government.
Hollings is no gigabit guru; he is opposed to Tauzin-
Dingell because he is a friend of AT&T (the *cable* non-
competition company) and to the konstipated kontent krowd.
Meanwhile, the ILEC teleban is regrouping in regulatory and
legislative caves of several state governments. Having
killed off the Competitive Local Exchange (CLEC) business,
it is going after the next threat -- forward looking public
entities, such as municipal utility districts and publicly
owned power companies, that see how important an advanced
communications infrastructure is to their local economies.
Today there are nine states with significant barriers to
publicly owned telecommunications, up from four in 1998
(see SMART Letter #12, October 10, 1998). Here's the
current Hall of Shame of states with legal barriers to
publicly owned telecom:
+ Arkansas prohibits municipal entities from providing
local exchange services. (Ark. Code § 23-17-409)
+ Florida imposes various taxes to increase the prices of
telecommunications services (as distinguished from other
services) sold by public entities. (Florida Statutes §§
125.421, 166.047, 196.012, 199.183 and 212.08)
+ Missouri bars municipalities and municipal electric
utilities from selling or leasing telecommunications
services or telecommunications facilities, except
services for internal uses; services for educational,
emergency and health care uses; and "Internet-type"
services. (Revised Statutes of Missouri § 392.410(7)
+ Minnesota requires municipalities to obtain a super-
majority of 65% of the voters before providing
telecommunications services. (Minn Stat. Ann § 237.19)
+ Nevada prohibits municipalities larger than 25,000 from
providing "telecommunications services," as defined by
federal law. (Nevada Statutes § 268.086)
+ Tennessee bans municipal provision of paging and
security service and allows provisions of cable, two-way
video, video programming, Internet and other "like"
services only upon satisfying various anti-competitive
public disclosure, hearing and voting requirements that
a private provider would not have to meet. (Tennessee
Code Ann. § 7-52-601 et seq.)
+ Texas bars municipalities and municipal electric
utilities from offering telecommunications services to
the public either directly or indirectly through a
private telecommunications provider. (Texas Utilities
Code. § 54.201 et seq.)
+ Virginia prohibits all localities except the Town of
Abingdon (the home of a prominent member of Congress)
from offering telecommunications services of facilities,
but allows localities to sell the telecommunications
infrastructure that they had in place on September 1,
1998, and also allows localities to sell or lease "dark
fiber" subject to several onerous conditions. (Virginia
Code § 15.2-1500) [Note: Overturned in District Court,
May 16, 2001]
+ Utah Enacted H.B. 149 during the 2001 session
establishing many onerous conditions . . . upon any
municipality seeking to provide telecommunications or
cable services. Enacted 3/13/2001
Be alert for a teleban attack on your city or state's right
to own and run its own infrastructure.
[Source: American Public Power Association, provided to the
SMART Letter by Eileen deArmon, Director of Marketing,
World Wide Packets.]
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QUOTE OF NOTE: Bill Gates on 802.11
"Let me be clear: Microsoft expects 802.11 and its
supersets to be present in most places that people spend
time. In corporate offices it will be pervasive. In
campuses, hotels, convention centers, airports, shopping
centers; virtually everywhere this 11 megabit and up
capability will be there."
Microsoft Chairman Bill Gates at the Microsoft Professional
Developers Conference, Oct 23 2001
[If Bill says that 802.11 is the future, he is right by
definition, but 802.11 could be heading for problems, as
per the article below. -- David I]
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PACKET RELAY RADIO TO THE RESCUE!
by David S. Isenberg
Imagine this telephone company advertisement: "DSL – all
the network connectivity you'll ever need." It's a joke,
right?
Technologically speaking, fiber wins. It is the end game.
But fiber access has two problems: big-capital economics
and telco-shaped policy. Fiber is the direct route to
shipping the most bits per second per dollar, but initial
construction costs present huge barriers. The current
capital crunch may have brought new fiber construction to a
standstill.
And there are bigger problems – fiber cables are enough
like copper twisted-pair that telephone companies can use
100 years of legal and regulatory know-how to exclude and
impede competition based on routing and stringing cables
Meanwhile, the need for high bit-rate connections remains.
The longer we have to wait to get fiber, the more
attractive less optimal solutions, including wireless ones,
become.
At present, unlicensed wireless access – such as the
Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers Inc.
(IEEE)'s 802.11b, also known as WiFi – delivers speeds
measured in megabits. While 802.11b is slower than fiber
and much more complicated, it nonetheless provides easier
access than fiber because: (a) it is unlicensed, therefore
difficult for incumbent communications companies to
control; and (b) you can buy it off-the-shelf, plug it in,
and use it today.
But 802.11b may be short-lived, worries wireless pioneer
Dewayne Hendricks, who heads the Dandin Group Ltd.
Hendricks is concerned that as 802.11b gets popular, its
very popularity will make it harder to use. The 2.5GHz band
could become so crowded that nobody will want to go there.
Densely spaced 802.11b transmitters will make it more
difficult for receivers to distinguish desired signals from
undesired ones. Hendricks fears that people will respond by
trying to amplify (or otherwise boost) the 802.11b signal.
Indeed, such hardware hacks already abound.
Hendricks points out that 802.11b equipment is certified to
operate without a license, but only on a whole-system
basis. Virtually every 802.11b hardware hack is illegal, he
says. And this is only part of the destruction-by-
popularity story. Other devices – like portable phones,
Bluetooth devices, and (soon to come) radio-driven lighting
– operate in the same 2.5GHz frequency band.
Hendricks thinks that 802.11b is a train-wreck in the
making. Furthermore, he says, there is nothing to prevent
802.11a (also unlicensed, operating at 5+ GHz) from
following a similar trajectory. As currently conceived,
unlicensed spectrum could devolve into a hobbyist's
playground.
Independent network architect David P. Reed agrees, but he
believes impending problems with unlicensed spectrum are
tractable, given sufficiently advanced technology.
Reed believes that the key issue is scalability. He points
to Tim Shepard's 1995 Massachusetts Institute of Technology
(MIT) thesis, now famous among high bit-rate connectivity
fans, as support for Reed's insight that unlicensed data
radios need only one additional property to become
sufficiently scaleable to serve the general public – packet
relay. Shepard's thesis demonstrated mathematically that a
wireless packet-relay architecture could support tele-
densities as thick as those found in Manhattan.
A packet-relay radio contains a radio and a router. Only
some of the packets it receives have reached their intended
destinations – the rest are forwarded to other packet-relay
radios. Each packet-relay unit has some knowledge of its
neighbors. Together, the aggregate of radios forms an ad
hoc, self-organizing, multi-hop mesh network. In principle,
service providers need only build access points within this
mesh to, for example, connect to the Internet.
Wireless packet-relay networks solve the problem of
multiple, powerful, overlapping transmitters. A network of
weak transmitters (with routers attached) can send a packet
a long way without unnecessarily trampling on the spectral
commons. Multiple hops replace additional amplification.
Packet-relay radio networks have some other nice
properties, too. They solve the line-of-sight problem that
restricts single-hop 802.11b transmissions. Multiple hops
can get around a large building or over a hill. In
addition, packet relay does not have the problems of large,
capital-intensive buildouts, because customers own most of
the infrastructure. When you want to connect to a packet-
relay network, you go down to Radios-R-Us, bring home a
unit, and plug it in. When you connect, you beef up the
network infrastructure – adding redundant routing and
increasing the potential throughput of the entire network.
Economists call this "increasing returns." Reed calls it
"architected cooperation."
Wireless packet-relay access remains an active sector,
despite today's telecom recession. A few of the companies
focusing on multihop architectures that use unlicensed
spectrum include:
Ember Corp. -- http://www.ember.com/
Flarion Technologies -- http://www.flarion.com
MeshNetworks Inc. -- http://www.meshnetworks.com
Nokia RoofTop -- www.wbs.nokia.com
SkyPilot Network Inc. -- www skypilot.com
Speedcom Wireless Corp. -- www.speedcomwireless.com
UltraDevices Inc. -- www.ultradevices.com
[Disclosure: I'm on the UltraDevices advisory board.]
[Steve Stroh, perpetrator of Steve Stroh's Focus On
Broadband Wireless Internet Access, counts some 17
equipment providers in this space. -- David I]
Will wireless packet-relay networks replace fiber access?
[Not likely.] One can envision scenarios in which packet
relay and fiber access grow together. For example, there
may be a need for fiber in neighborhoods to support
backhaul from packet-relay networks to Internet exchanges.
Then packet-relay networks would form an infrastructure to
support the discovery of bandwidth-hungry applications.
In later stages, the demand for bandwidth could grow so
fast that an infrastructure of radios would be relatively
expensive, compared to fiber access. At that point,
communities (or entrepreneurs or forward-looking utilities)
would build out fiber, because the need for cost-effective,
high bit-rate connections would be stronger than ever.
[The above article originally appeared in Light Reading,
March 11, 2002
http://www.lightreading.com/document.asp?doc_id=12395]
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QUOTE OF NOTE: Michael Swaine on the DMCA
"The shameful legacy of the Digital Millenium Copyright
Act:
+ Compact discs that can't be played in computers or
even some CD players
+ A visiting Russian programmer put in prison for giving
a technical talk
+ A magazine sued successfully for publishing a link to
a Web site
+ A US professor threatened when he tried to publish the
results of his research
+ E-book licenses prohibiting the reader from reading
the book out loud
+ Click-on licenses making it a violation even to
criticize the contents of the work
Michael Swaine, "Down with the DMCA!"
in webreview, February 4, 2002
http://www.webreview.com/swaine/2002/02_04_02.shtml
[The effects of the DCMA accumulate too slowly to be "news"
but they are too important to be left post hoc to
historians, so us frogs need to keep reminding ourselves
that the water's still getting hotter. -- David I]
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QUOTE OF NOTE: Steve Talbot on Evil
"I was raised a traditionalist conservative, and one of
the rock-solid virtues of that mindset was a vivid
awareness that the line between good and evil runs
through every individual heart. This, of course, was
why one distrusted all schemes for salvation-by-
government and favored the notion of checks and
balances. No excess of power should be vested in any
one place, because no group of people can claim fully to
have healed their own hearts of that fundamental schism.
"When we begin to believe that we've fingered the true
locus of evil "over there" rather than "in here" -- when
the battle between "us" and "them" is equated with the
battle between good and evil -- then we have placed
ourselves above all evil. This is to make gods of
ourselves.
"Yes, we must resist evil in the world -- resist it for
all we are worth. We must strive to represent the good
against the evil. This endless, internal striving --
never wholly successful, never finished once for all --
is, in fact, the decisive thing. But when the evil
turns out, after all, to be over there, the striving is
no longer necessary. It becomes *nothing but* a matter
of dialing in the coordinates and calling down the
bombs.
"This is how disastrous moral reversal occurs. To focus
on the evil over there is to forget its strategic
alliance with the evil in oneself, and to forget the
evil in oneself is to turn one's own good -- now
untethered from modesty and rendered tyrannical -- into
a magnified power for evil. If we follow this path of
arrogance, the destruction we call down upon the world
may be unparalleled. "
Stephen L. Talbott, Editor of NETFUTURE: Technology and
Human Responsibility, in NETFUTURE, Issue #129, March 12,
2002
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QUOTE OF NOTE: Fred Knight on IP PBXes
"The buzz at VoiceCon [2002] . . . was about IP telephony
. . . None - and I mean NONE -- of the PBX vendors have
a next-gen, circuit-switched, TDM product in the
pipeline. They are all betting their futures - and their
customers' - on packetized voice."
Fred Knight, editor of Business Communications Review, in
BCR eWeekly, Issue 12, March 5, 2002.
[At least something's going right :-) -- David I]
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CONFERENCES ON MY CALENDAR
March 17-22, 2002. San Jose CA. The Cisco Powered Network
Operations Symposium. I'll be speaking on March 19,
focusing on the distinction between connectivity and
services. The symposium is not exactly open -- your company
must be part of the Cisco Powered Network program, see
http://cisco.com/cpn. More information on the symposium is
at http://cisco.com/go/ops2002.
April 8-11, 2002. Seattle. VON (Voice on the Net).
On April 10, at 9:35AM, I'll be leading a panel on
"Financing Disruption" that was inspired by SMART Letters
#64 and #65. The panel will feature CIBC analyst Stephen
Kamman, an extremely rare public appearance by Roxane
Googin, some other SMART People as I confirm their
participation, and yours truly. My bottom line is that
voice is a diminishingly tiny deal on The Stupid Network,
but it still accounts for a disproportionate share of
revenues. Come for the Googin-Kamman show, but stay to get
the latest on SIP, the technology that will disrupt telco
voice whether or not we get Fiber-to-the-X. More info at
http://pulver.com/von.
April 18, 2002. Sioux Falls SD. MIDnet/GPN Spring
Networking Conference. If you've never been to Sioux Falls,
you're in for a middle-American data-networking treat.
Sioux Falls is a major node on the network, home to
Citibank's credit card operations, to LodgeNet, the second
largest U.S. provider of entertainment and information
services to hotels and motels, and to Northwestern
Corporation, a multi-glomerate as solid as the midwest that
(far as I can tell) doesn't use fancy accounting and still
makes honest money. I'm not quite sure what I am stepping
into here -- today MIDnet looks like a Verio company. SMART
People can find more information at
http://www.midnetinc.org/conferences.html.
May 21-23, 2002. Boston. Connectivity 2002. A
celebration of networks so abundant that they will carry
everything effortlessly. For more information see
http://pulver.com/connectivity2002 or contact Daniel
Berninger, 631.547.0800.
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part of it, is permitted for non-commercial purposes,
provided that the two lines below are reproduced with it:
Copyright 2002 by David S. Isenberg
isen@isen.com -- http://www.isen.com/ -- 1-888-isen-com
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