Dana Blankenhorn

Routing Around The Bells

The evils of the Bell monopoly continue to get worse-and-worse.

Yet I remain optimistic. But first, let me vent a little.

So-called "broadband" users are still paying the same price for the same speeds as a decade ago, while the costs of actually moving the bits have fallen by more than a thousand-fold. Koreans consider our "broadband" a joke. And our wireless situation is no better. Every new auction is dominated by the same frequency hoarders, so we still pay $100 or more a month for what's essentially narrow-band wireless service. And nothing has been added to the unlicensed 802.11 spectrum, nor is it likely to be.

With the Bells facing a Congress which has other, more pressing business, and little appetite for more subsidies, it's getting what it wants from the states, where officials are incredibly ignorant. No one seems to understand that the AT&T push into "cable" is just an excuse not to liberate any bandwidth for true broadband Internet service.  Everything gets defined as a "service," with  an added monthly fee whether you use it or not, and nothing gets better, as it should under Moore's Law.

I'm facing nothing but crap from my cellular provider, Sprint. They only sell, they never service. They hid a $10/month "data" charge on my camera phone, they sold me a phone their other stores knew was a piece of crap (Motorola, you can go Chapter 7 now) and I'm paying $160/month for services I was told would cost $90/month, when their junk fees are added in. Trying to change anything in a store is impossible -- you have to go on-hold for an hour to talk with anyone. And this is the only national carrier alternative to the AT&T-Verizon duopoly -- it makes me want to spit.

Yet I remain optimistic. Here's why.

Bell Fight Must be in Open Source Agenda

The fight against AT&T, both its horizontal and vertical break-up to guarantee market competition, must be an integral part of any progressive open source agenda.

Right now AT&T is an unregulated monopoly, which takes enormous subsidies from the taxpayer. It has now begun, with the cooperation of the FCC, to increase those subsidies.

That's what companies do. Poor man want to be rich, rich man want to be king, and a king ain't satisfied until he rules everything, as the song goes. AT&T is now King of the U.S. Internet, and it won't be satisfied until it can do there what it does in cellular, namely sell bits through an eyedropper, control what the bits do, and take monopoly profit from each side of every transaction. This is no different from what an African PTT used to do back in the 1980s, and that's where our economy will go if we allow this.

This is a perfect set of issues in which open source politics can work. It involves the identification of Astroturf groups, bought-off research and other fronts. It involves  focusing the government on simple goals -- nothing less than a break-up will do -- and it involves keeping politicians' feet to the fire on this.

It's ironic that humor seems to be the best weapon against what we face (as above), but that's the way it is when democracy has been destroyed and utterly corrupted. Humor was the only weapon against Stalin, and when you have powerful corporations controlling state action calling the result democracy is just brain-dead.

BellSouth Plays Hardball to Spite its Face

BellSouth, soon to become part of AT&T, is starting to play a peculiar kind of hardball with Georgia home developers.

The Atlanta Journal-Constitution reports the company is telling them that if they dare sign a deal with another communications company (like cable) to provide services in their development, then BellSouth will never, ever, ever "provision" that neighborhood with phone lines.

According to the paper, developers are taking this nonsense seriously.

When we opened our sales center, the carrier we chose had not yet installed lines," said Rick Mildner, chief operating officer for the developer (a project called Tributary at New Manchester)

"Even though the BellSouth line went right by, they declined to provide service. When I called, they basically said, 'Well, sue us.' "

Does this matter? Very much. You've heard of taxation without representation? How about taxation without service?

The Bells Will Take Nothing (And Like It Very Much)

By trying for a complete telecomm overhaul, under a bill called S.2686 Sen. Ted Stevens has managed to stall the debate about net neutrality, the Bells’ efforts to get a national cable franchise, and everything else.

The likely result is no bill at all will come out. Unless there’s something from the Senate, there can be no conference. Thus no telecomm bill.  The clock is ticking,  the campaign trail is calling, and Stevens is still locked in a committee room, with hundreds of amendments to get through. No time for a floor fight.

The Bells will say this is bad, terrible in fact. They will then be called upon, by Stevens and others, to put up whatever is needed to re-elect the Republican Congress. And they will likely put up enough to be a power should the Democrats win.

So who wins?

The Bells. (That's Ed Whitacre of AT&T, nee SBC, at right.)

By having the FCC expand the “Universal Service Fee” and impose it on Voice Over IP, the Bells gain new subsidies without any obligation to be fair to their competitors. Remember, net neutrality language was designed to keep the Bells from doing things. No bill means they can do what they want.

But don’t despair. The bill Stevens was working on was worse than nothing. As Bruce Kushnick notes, the Stevens bill would increase USF fees – all of which go to the Bells – by 233%.

And what would the Bells do for that money? Nothing. They’ve been making money by doing nothing for a decade. Qwest was paid to wire Arizona schools for broadband  and did nothing. The same promises were made in Hawaii, in Alaska – everywhere the Bells wanted to consolidate, and buy one another out, they made big promises of fiber everywhere.

They built none of it.

Who Can Save The Internet?

Vint Cerf  can.

It’s ironic that the man known as the “Father of the Internet” is now best-positioned to do what is needed to save it. To save it as a neutral medium, an end-to-end “network of networks.”

Cerf is currently “chief evangelist” at Google. He joined it from MCI, now part of Verizon. Mostly, he’s a spokesman, a Washington-based attender of cocktail parties, the old guy they trot out and hand plaques to when they want Capitol street cred. “Here’s the Father of the Internet. He works for us.”

But assuming net neutrality loses in the Senate,  Google faces a problem. The Bells are determined to cut it off at the knees, either demanding blackmail (they’ll call it “congestion fees” but it’s the same thing) or cutting deals with rivals (Yahoo) to slow access to Google services.

And many of the services Google is bringing on-stream need a fast, neutral net to work. Google Talk. Video search.

But there is a way out.

Dark fiber.

The Story I Can’t Cover

One reason I spend too much time on politics and other trivia is that my tech beat is closed.

I can’t cover the biggest technology story of our time.

That is the story of the Next Great Interface, the Laptop Replacement.

It’s closed to me because mobile carriers in the U.S. insist on their networks being closed, so change only happens there as quickly as their bureaucracies move. They see bits as services and demand payment for every file, which makes usage costs unreasonable. And WiFi doesn’t have the coverage area (yet) to stimulate the discussion.

The Laptop Replacement will mainly be a set of interfaces, with storage. It would make sense if it were based on Linux, with XML support. That would accelerate development by bringing the economics of open source to the party.

It would look like a phone, or maybe a Blackberry. It would allow seamless connections not just to your desktop, but to your home network. For a consumer this might mean their ISP and their personal Web site files, as well as their home. For a business this would mean their business network.

Security and audit trails would be integral to this device. Businesses would want it first, and they would need to track permissions for file downloads.

Among the inputs would be biometrics, again to authenticate usage of network files and resources. In time a voice input to the network would be nice. This would double the security and make the whole thing easier to use.

You would tell this device, in some way, what files you wanted, in what order, and it would get those files over the Internet for you, in the background, letting you know when they were available. Then, once you arrived at your destination, you would dock the device and the files (a sales presentation, say) would be displayed on whatever machine you’re connected to.

We can’t work on this here because we lack the fat pipes necessary, and the open permissions for users necessary, to make this work. But such pipes exist in Korea and Japan and China, and there the work is ongoing.

The 911 Excuse

The most (politically) compelling argument the phone companies have against Voice Over IP is 911 service.

The heart of 911 is that your phone number travels with your call, so emergency services can reach you even if you hang up.

Thus, the phone companies are forcing E911 capability onto mobile companies, subsidizing the (welcome) addition of GPS, and to Voice Over IP, which forces companies like Vonage to beg for access to Bell trunks, which can then be denied bureaucratically, killing the competition.

But here is the one argument for VOIP that the Bells cannot answer, which destroys E911 entirely.

It's primitive.

• The victim has to make the call first. It is not pro-active.
• The emergency services are dependent on that voice line, which only delivers voice, in order to know what is going on.
• The emergency services are also dependent on the phone network.

This last is a very important point. After Katrina, wireless Internet services were brought online quickly while those stuck with phone lines literally drowned. Right now, in fact, New Orleans is practically covered in WiFi service while the phone network has yet to return to normal.

BellSouth is trying to turn this municipal-sponsored service off, but the fact is that WiFi is cheaper to install, more powerful, and in the end more reliable than wired telephony.

Now for the trump card:

Cisco-ification

Cisco Systems, which was the hero of the free Internet in the 1990s, has become its chief enemy.

That's because throughout this decade it has put most of its investment into systems that monitor or control what people do with the resource.

As Richard Doherty of Envisioneering, explained to me this week at the NCTA show, a lot of network operators still don't know the power they have in their hands with Cisco monitoring equipment.

One example is what Cisco calls Cisco Service Control Release 3.0.  This was acquired through a company called p-Cube. It's a box that can do deep packet inspection of everything coming through a network core, preventing people from using some services, and scaling others back, without anyone's knowledge.

I wrote about p-Cube some years ago. Their first sales of this device were to Singapore. Now Cisco is pushing this technology toward U.S. cable and phone ISPs and getting a good reception.

Freedom2Connect: The VON Panel

At Monday’s Freedom2Connect conference Jonathan Askin also put together a discussion of Voice over the Network (VON), commonly called VOIP.

It consisted of two talks. The first was by Jim Kohlenberger, now Executive Director, of the VON Coalition.  But when that group launched he was a staffer in the Clinton White House, working on telecommunications issues.

The second talk was by Tom Evslin. Before launching his Fractals of Change blog (and the novel Hackoff) he was CEO of ITXC, a VOIP provider. 

Jonathan Askin – For the first time policymakers are looking at regulating the Internet. And we’re starting to see the possible implications. Now we have no regulation of the facility but regulation of the application.