[IP] Lucky warns of end-user broadband expectations
Date: Sat, 03 Apr 2004 16:37:25 -0800
From: Dewayne Hendricks <dewayne@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
[Note: I posted a story on Bob Lucky's keynote from 'Electronic News'
last week. Here's 'EE Times' take on his talk, that comes up with a much
different view then the other story. DLH]
Lucky warns of end-user broadband expectations
By Loring Wirbel , EE Times
March 31, 2004 (9:07 PM EST)
URL:
<http://www.eetimes.com/article/showArticle.jhtml?articleId=18700125>
SAN FRANCISCO ? Former Bellcore and Telcordia Research head Robert Lucky
warned of the end-user expectations for "free" service as a key factor
affecting future telecom recovery.
At the keynote speech Wednesday (March 31) for the Communication Design
Conference, Lucky said that free services have different and sometimes
contradictory meanings in wireline and wireless environments. Using the
example of Voice Over Internet Protocol's impact on circuit-switched voice
service, Lucky said that the telecom market's primary problem is that "no
one knows what anything costs."
"Telecom may be heading the way of DRAMs, where the price is set by the
most idiotic competitor," Lucky said. "It's a race to the bottom, and the
bottom in this case is free service."
Lucky said that he was concerned that VoIP service providers like Vonage
and Skype were forcing incumbent carriers to offer free VoIP services,
"like lemmings going into the sea." It may be true that end-to-end IP
networks offer slightly lower costs than circuit-switched networks, he
said, but user expectations of a free lunch mean that no one pays for
infrastructure maintenance.
Lucky said that even though he spent his career in the telephony realm
dominated by a centralized Advanced Intelligent Network, he believed in the
inevitability of a dumb central fabric and intelligent end nodes. The
overall costs may be more in a connectionless packet-switched network, he
said, but the empowerment provided to end users makes IP a better system "
provided end users realize that some costs must be borne by users and
service providers to maintain backbones of the system.
One power of wireless networks, he said, is that they can come closer to
a true free network, albeit not in the model of auctioning licensed
spectrum. The 3G auctions in Europe ended up costing European carriers more
than it would have cost to provide fiber to every end user in Europe, he said.
The real advantage of wireless networks will come in next-generation
cognitive radio, adaptive antennas, MIMO systems, ultra-wideband systems,
and other technologies that assume that waves in the same frequency band
are not interferers " interference is merely a property of the receiver
design. With broad spectrum re-use, future wireless services will win out
by coming closer to the user's expectation of virtually free provisioning
of service.
But will broadband growth slow in the future? Lucky said he saw some
market saturation already becoming apparent in Asia, particularly in Korea
and China. If bandwidth, storage, and processing are close to free, he
said, then content will have to be the driver. Based on current digital
rights management policies of organizations like Motion Picture Association
of America and Recording Industry Association of America, he said, interest
in broadband services will slow up, and citizens will be left with the fox
(owners of content rights under the Digital Millenium Copyright Act)
guarding the henhouse.
Two social visions are competing in deciding telecom's future, Lucky
said. The "field of dreams" camp believes that end users should simply be
provided with 100 Mbits/sec per user, and applications will emerge through
capability. Social engineering camps believe that social goals, such as the
desire to have half of all workers be telecommuters, should drive broadband
policy. In either event, better models of how costs are borne by society
must help determine policy, he said.
"We still can't say for sure, were we hit by a truly perfect storm, or
are the characteristics of the telecommunications business just no good any
more?" Lucky said.
Archives at: <http://Wireless.Com/Dewayne-Net>
Weblog at: <http://weblog.warpspeed.com>
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