What could we say?
I always hope that the next is better than the one which is gone.
Just to realize that it was better when it was worse.
One thing is always the same: the future approaches us at 60 minutes an hour.
And if there is someone who reads this: Happy New Year!
Patrizia from a World on IP
Friday, December 31, 2004
They have a hell of a nerve...
"It should be pointed out that the first responsibility of the US government is to US citizens and we have people living below the poverty level, people without health care, and are drying up the Pell Grant program for college students.
The whole thing is a disgrace -- our economy -- and the fact that these other countries mock our genorsity; they have a hell of a nerve -- and that guy backed down."
You are damned right...but it is a surprise to me...in a country where the President is guided directly from our Boss up there...
One would expect a little bit more of generosity, from a country that already spends billions to bring Democracy to the World...
But may be this is the real lesson from the Bible.
God himself had to invent BAD, otherwise, how could HE look so good?
If the World was a happy island inhabited just by good people, how could we appreciate it? How could we feel so well when we do the slight good to somebody?
This is the answer, HE didn't Forbid the Serpent to Adam and Eve, otherwise instead of the Apple they would have eaten the Devil, and the whole story of this world would have been different.
They would have disobeyed the same, of course, but then, Hell would have had to disappear, we wouldn't have needed to be good, because we just couldn't have been something else...
It is getting too complicated.
Being selfish is human... admitting it, is something more...
Patrizia
The whole thing is a disgrace -- our economy -- and the fact that these other countries mock our genorsity; they have a hell of a nerve -- and that guy backed down."
You are damned right...but it is a surprise to me...in a country where the President is guided directly from our Boss up there...
One would expect a little bit more of generosity, from a country that already spends billions to bring Democracy to the World...
But may be this is the real lesson from the Bible.
God himself had to invent BAD, otherwise, how could HE look so good?
If the World was a happy island inhabited just by good people, how could we appreciate it? How could we feel so well when we do the slight good to somebody?
This is the answer, HE didn't Forbid the Serpent to Adam and Eve, otherwise instead of the Apple they would have eaten the Devil, and the whole story of this world would have been different.
They would have disobeyed the same, of course, but then, Hell would have had to disappear, we wouldn't have needed to be good, because we just couldn't have been something else...
It is getting too complicated.
Being selfish is human... admitting it, is something more...
Patrizia
Tuesday, December 28, 2004
Mobile office
Regardless of whether they are at home or at a
branch location, employees have access to all
telecommunications functions using any terminal
device in their mobile office. Contact
remains possible via a single telephone number.
This not only increases employee flexibility,
but it reduces telecommunications costs
by optimizing communication paths. These
functionalities are available as components
and as integrated systems.
When you can be reached
any time, anywhere, by any
means, will you be more
productive?
“Unified” Presence/Availability/Modality
Management
The public Internet enabled the idea of “always
on” access to information and messaging contacts.
Rather than sending asynchronous email, being
aware of a recipient’s existing (Internet) connection
enabled a user to start a “chat” or immediate
text message exchange.
This capability is expanding to real-time voice
message exchanges (e.g., wireless push-to-talk)
and, with IP Telephony, will change the way we
use telephones to both initiate and receive real time
communication.
Today’s “buddy list” concept of instant messaging
is a way for users to selectively control
immediate access to themselves by specified people
or vice versa—or, in the future, even by specified
application processes. It works hand-in-hand
with “presence” awareness (network connectedness)
to let the initiator know whether to start an
instant message exchange, or simply leave a message.
The buddy list is an extension of the directory
function, which can provide personalization
information for automatically managing all personal
communication.
From a contact initiator’s perspective, the
availability and status information can become the
logical first step in selecting the most practical
mode of location-independent communication at
the moment, rather than guessing and wasting
time with different contact attempts.
“Buddy lists”
will work
hand-in-hand
with presence
capabilities
How will we deal
with the
explosion of
features?
The vision of “unified messaging” and “unified
communications” has had to wait for the practicalities
of a converged voice/data network infrastructure
to make implementation possible. The
market movement towards IP telephony and
instant messaging is now helping make this vision
a reality. In the meantime, wireless handheld
mobility has also become a “must-have” capability
for more and more enterprise end users, and
this, too, has reinforced the need for converged
communications.
Mobile users will need the ease and flexibility
of changing modalities to match their situation
and those they are communicating with. The necessary
intelligence to minimize the confusion in
making contact with others will be found in a
cross-network, multimodal capability that dynamically
coordinates the needs and priorities of both
parties.
What end users really want from converged
communications will be flexible, easy-to-use,
mobile and remote communication services that
will save them time and effort in communicating
with others, and, sometimes more importantly,
will save others’ time in contacting them. Of
course, the technology should be relatively costefficient,
but, unless it does what they really need,
end users won’t bother with it even if it is free!
branch location, employees have access to all
telecommunications functions using any terminal
device in their mobile office. Contact
remains possible via a single telephone number.
This not only increases employee flexibility,
but it reduces telecommunications costs
by optimizing communication paths. These
functionalities are available as components
and as integrated systems.
When you can be reached
any time, anywhere, by any
means, will you be more
productive?
“Unified” Presence/Availability/Modality
Management
The public Internet enabled the idea of “always
on” access to information and messaging contacts.
Rather than sending asynchronous email, being
aware of a recipient’s existing (Internet) connection
enabled a user to start a “chat” or immediate
text message exchange.
This capability is expanding to real-time voice
message exchanges (e.g., wireless push-to-talk)
and, with IP Telephony, will change the way we
use telephones to both initiate and receive real time
communication.
Today’s “buddy list” concept of instant messaging
is a way for users to selectively control
immediate access to themselves by specified people
or vice versa—or, in the future, even by specified
application processes. It works hand-in-hand
with “presence” awareness (network connectedness)
to let the initiator know whether to start an
instant message exchange, or simply leave a message.
The buddy list is an extension of the directory
function, which can provide personalization
information for automatically managing all personal
communication.
From a contact initiator’s perspective, the
availability and status information can become the
logical first step in selecting the most practical
mode of location-independent communication at
the moment, rather than guessing and wasting
time with different contact attempts.
“Buddy lists”
will work
hand-in-hand
with presence
capabilities
How will we deal
with the
explosion of
features?
The vision of “unified messaging” and “unified
communications” has had to wait for the practicalities
of a converged voice/data network infrastructure
to make implementation possible. The
market movement towards IP telephony and
instant messaging is now helping make this vision
a reality. In the meantime, wireless handheld
mobility has also become a “must-have” capability
for more and more enterprise end users, and
this, too, has reinforced the need for converged
communications.
Mobile users will need the ease and flexibility
of changing modalities to match their situation
and those they are communicating with. The necessary
intelligence to minimize the confusion in
making contact with others will be found in a
cross-network, multimodal capability that dynamically
coordinates the needs and priorities of both
parties.
What end users really want from converged
communications will be flexible, easy-to-use,
mobile and remote communication services that
will save them time and effort in communicating
with others, and, sometimes more importantly,
will save others’ time in contacting them. Of
course, the technology should be relatively costefficient,
but, unless it does what they really need,
end users won’t bother with it even if it is free!
Tuesday, December 21, 2004
The "Peer to Peer through Peer Network"
Since the first man was born or appeared on this earth his life was dedicated to the answer to two big questions: Who he was and why he was.
And communication has been the natural evolution of this need.
Communicating was sharing and exchanging opinions.
The first step was toward finding a way of an open standard of sounds that gave life to a language, an "Idiom".
The second one was converting the spoken language in icons, expressing a word or a feeling.
The birth of computers meant a simplification of all the complicated ways to simulate the work of the human brain in communication.
Digitalization was nothing different from the big step taken thousands of years ago by the ones who simplified the iconographic way of writing and inventing the alphabet.
Instead of the sound of a full word or phrase, they invented 22 simple letters that expressed the main sounds of our expressions and with those 22 sounds they built all the possible words, and the words built phrases and phrases made pages and pages made books and so on.
With the birth of computers data became numbers and the following step was simplifying their transmission.
The Internet was possible and useful because the computer had been invented, as hand writing was enormously wide spread thanks to the invention of the alphabet.
Also the printing machines and the Mass Market printing machine, the type writer, were possible because of the invention of the alphabet.
The world is changing at a fast rate because wide spread communication is possible thanks to the Internet.
Whether the communication is data, voice, music, video, it is digitized and encapsulated into packets. Every packet has a destination address and a tag for class of service.
Every packet is sent and reaches a destination through the Internet thanks to the invention of the computer.
In this new, progressive, digital world there is no place for old antiquated "iconographic" way of communication.
The Telecoms still exist thanks to the Monopoly and the stupidity of our politicians (and the ignorance of many).
How long will progress have to wait?
Patrizia from a World on IP
And communication has been the natural evolution of this need.
Communicating was sharing and exchanging opinions.
The first step was toward finding a way of an open standard of sounds that gave life to a language, an "Idiom".
The second one was converting the spoken language in icons, expressing a word or a feeling.
The birth of computers meant a simplification of all the complicated ways to simulate the work of the human brain in communication.
Digitalization was nothing different from the big step taken thousands of years ago by the ones who simplified the iconographic way of writing and inventing the alphabet.
Instead of the sound of a full word or phrase, they invented 22 simple letters that expressed the main sounds of our expressions and with those 22 sounds they built all the possible words, and the words built phrases and phrases made pages and pages made books and so on.
With the birth of computers data became numbers and the following step was simplifying their transmission.
The Internet was possible and useful because the computer had been invented, as hand writing was enormously wide spread thanks to the invention of the alphabet.
Also the printing machines and the Mass Market printing machine, the type writer, were possible because of the invention of the alphabet.
The world is changing at a fast rate because wide spread communication is possible thanks to the Internet.
Whether the communication is data, voice, music, video, it is digitized and encapsulated into packets. Every packet has a destination address and a tag for class of service.
Every packet is sent and reaches a destination through the Internet thanks to the invention of the computer.
In this new, progressive, digital world there is no place for old antiquated "iconographic" way of communication.
The Telecoms still exist thanks to the Monopoly and the stupidity of our politicians (and the ignorance of many).
How long will progress have to wait?
Patrizia from a World on IP
Sunday, December 19, 2004
Why Wi-Fi will win.
Once people made a Market. Needs made the Future.
Now no more.
In this society of the "Must Have" what makes the Market's rules is not anymore what people want, but what they are "invited" to want.
And what they want is generally what they do not have, something new, which generally will be in the place of the "old".
So that the garbage can is never empty and there is always something new to produce, because there is always something new to consume.
At the end of every year and the beginning of the next, there is a game in forecasting the future possibilities of the Market.
And we come very often to the most extravagant predictions, like "we will be able in the near future to look at TV on our portable phone".
Now, syllogism is a complicated sequence of logical conclusions, whose characteristic is that you start from a perfectly reasonable statement and, through surreptitious assumptions you gradually change the reasonable nature of your first figure until you reach a complete distortion which can be utterly unreasonable.
For example "TV is a highly requested and used medium", the portable phone is a "widespread and ubiquitous tool to communicate" so, putting together two successful mass market products, you would be sure to have a greater one.
Syllogism is one thing and reality can be totally different.
In an age where the tastes of the people are daily more sophisticated, where an analog TV is an obsolete tool, is quite unrealistic to think that somebody would enjoy a TV program on such a small screen as the phone's.
But one thing is sure and shouldn't be under valuated by investors: the Market badly needs something new to promote, to sell, to "invite" the people to consume.
And the future is there, clear and inviting.
There are several requirements to fulfill to give life to a new product:
It must be something alluring.
It must cover the expectations of the mass.
It must be at an affordable price.
It must be easy to find.
It must be easily reachable.
It must fit with our life.
It must be well commercialized.
Entertainment has been since long a safe investment, and TV, Cable, Satellite have been since long the way to deliver what goes under the name of "home entertainment".
The Internet is the new medium facing the future and alluring investors.
It needs three main conditions to fulfill its promises:
1) Content. But that is already available.
2) A good and high compression for the big files.(mostly video)
3) A cheap broadband mean to deliver content.
And at point 3 is where Wi-Fi comes into the picture.
Because point 1 and 2 are already available and the Market is eager to change channels.
Content needs badly a broadband delivery and Wi-Fi needs badly content to deliver.
Take for example a rural location with an average of 10.000 people.
If you deliver fast broadband Internet with a Wireless system you will have
an investment of X, N users/customers and a ROI of Y.
But if you deliver high quality content, for example, good quality and low price VoIP (best if wireless) movies on demand, music programs, you will have the same investment X in infrastructures, but N² users/customers and Y³ ROI.
A market product can only be understood backward, but must be planed forward.
Now no more.
In this society of the "Must Have" what makes the Market's rules is not anymore what people want, but what they are "invited" to want.
And what they want is generally what they do not have, something new, which generally will be in the place of the "old".
So that the garbage can is never empty and there is always something new to produce, because there is always something new to consume.
At the end of every year and the beginning of the next, there is a game in forecasting the future possibilities of the Market.
And we come very often to the most extravagant predictions, like "we will be able in the near future to look at TV on our portable phone".
Now, syllogism is a complicated sequence of logical conclusions, whose characteristic is that you start from a perfectly reasonable statement and, through surreptitious assumptions you gradually change the reasonable nature of your first figure until you reach a complete distortion which can be utterly unreasonable.
For example "TV is a highly requested and used medium", the portable phone is a "widespread and ubiquitous tool to communicate" so, putting together two successful mass market products, you would be sure to have a greater one.
Syllogism is one thing and reality can be totally different.
In an age where the tastes of the people are daily more sophisticated, where an analog TV is an obsolete tool, is quite unrealistic to think that somebody would enjoy a TV program on such a small screen as the phone's.
But one thing is sure and shouldn't be under valuated by investors: the Market badly needs something new to promote, to sell, to "invite" the people to consume.
And the future is there, clear and inviting.
There are several requirements to fulfill to give life to a new product:
It must be something alluring.
It must cover the expectations of the mass.
It must be at an affordable price.
It must be easy to find.
It must be easily reachable.
It must fit with our life.
It must be well commercialized.
Entertainment has been since long a safe investment, and TV, Cable, Satellite have been since long the way to deliver what goes under the name of "home entertainment".
The Internet is the new medium facing the future and alluring investors.
It needs three main conditions to fulfill its promises:
1) Content. But that is already available.
2) A good and high compression for the big files.(mostly video)
3) A cheap broadband mean to deliver content.
And at point 3 is where Wi-Fi comes into the picture.
Because point 1 and 2 are already available and the Market is eager to change channels.
Content needs badly a broadband delivery and Wi-Fi needs badly content to deliver.
Take for example a rural location with an average of 10.000 people.
If you deliver fast broadband Internet with a Wireless system you will have
an investment of X, N users/customers and a ROI of Y.
But if you deliver high quality content, for example, good quality and low price VoIP (best if wireless) movies on demand, music programs, you will have the same investment X in infrastructures, but N² users/customers and Y³ ROI.
A market product can only be understood backward, but must be planed forward.
Thursday, December 09, 2004
Monopoly, Monopoly, Monopoly, all around the World
There is an almost universal feeling that U.S. telecommunications laws and regulations are way out of step with current telecom reality.
The basic law was passed in 1934 and updated by the Telecommunications Act of 1996, which is eons (or longer) ago when it comes to telecom technology.
No one I know is looking forward to the prospect of Congress, outnumbered as it is by lobbyists, trying to "fix" the current mess.
If anyone did have any hope that such a process might result in a positive outcome, recent events in Pennsylvania will have extinguished them.
After more than a year and a half of trying, the Pennsylvania legislature recently passed House Bill 30, which updates the existing state telecom regulations.
This bill got a lot of press in mid-November because of a provision added late in the game that prohibits municipalities from offering "any telecommunications services, including advanced and broadband services" for a fee without basically getting the permission of the local monopoly telephone company (see Verizon deal lets Philadelphia move with wireless plan),
It's probably not a coincidence that this provision showed up around the time that Philadelphia announced a plan to offer inexpensive, citywide, Wi-Fi-based Internet service. This provision was clearly added to protect local monopoly telephone companies such as Verizon from municipal-based competition.
Under the provision, Verizon could block any future deployment of municipal-run networks by saying that it was going to offer similar speed Internet services in the same area.
That would be the case even if Verizon's services were not going to be available for years or were going to cost a hundred times what the municipal-run network was going to charge.
This provision almost perfectly symbolizes the entire bill.
The bill starts out with a bunch of good sounding platitudes describing how it aims to ensure that Pennsylvania will get the best telecom services that Verizon decides it wants to deliver.
Oops, that's a bit sarcastic, but that's how I felt when I read this bill. Telecom bills like this are ostensibly for the good of the public but in actuality mostly benefit two monopolies: the regional telephone company and the utility regulators. There is very little in this bill that will benefit the ordinary citizens of Pennsylvania.
They will get higher prices and little innovation.
The bill includes some bribes to get specific groups to support it.
For example, it establishes an educational technology fund (the e-fund) to support things that educators like. The level and passion of support from some people in the educational community for the bill shows that this type of payoff works. Of course the money has to come from somewhere and it will come from higher phone costs for the residents of Pennsylvania.
In other words, the e-fund and other similar goodies in the bill are supported by yet another tax on telephone users.
What is missing is any hint that the best way to get innovation and lower prices would be to encourage competition for basic phone service. But that would threaten both of the bill's main beneficiaries.
This bill is the result of a perfect storm of telecom regulators and big telecom lobbyists. But this storm is a local squall in comparison with the Category 4 hurricane that will spring up when Congress starts to revamp federal telecom law. It will be very ugly, and you can be sure the beneficiaries will not be you and me.
By Scott Bradner
Network World, 12/06/04
Not far from Italian Telecom.
Italy signed the Geneva Telecom Act and we would be supposed to be free to use the 2.4 GHz frequency.
But the only allowed frequency is 26 GHz. that doesn't have any use or application.
That is for sure.
Could we really think to be able to infringe the Telecom Monopoly?
But that is not even the fault of the Telecom.
The fault is in those who agree that it is a shame, but do nothing to change it.
We have the world that the majority of us deserves to have...
Patrizia form a World on IP
The basic law was passed in 1934 and updated by the Telecommunications Act of 1996, which is eons (or longer) ago when it comes to telecom technology.
No one I know is looking forward to the prospect of Congress, outnumbered as it is by lobbyists, trying to "fix" the current mess.
If anyone did have any hope that such a process might result in a positive outcome, recent events in Pennsylvania will have extinguished them.
After more than a year and a half of trying, the Pennsylvania legislature recently passed House Bill 30, which updates the existing state telecom regulations.
This bill got a lot of press in mid-November because of a provision added late in the game that prohibits municipalities from offering "any telecommunications services, including advanced and broadband services" for a fee without basically getting the permission of the local monopoly telephone company (see Verizon deal lets Philadelphia move with wireless plan),
It's probably not a coincidence that this provision showed up around the time that Philadelphia announced a plan to offer inexpensive, citywide, Wi-Fi-based Internet service. This provision was clearly added to protect local monopoly telephone companies such as Verizon from municipal-based competition.
Under the provision, Verizon could block any future deployment of municipal-run networks by saying that it was going to offer similar speed Internet services in the same area.
That would be the case even if Verizon's services were not going to be available for years or were going to cost a hundred times what the municipal-run network was going to charge.
This provision almost perfectly symbolizes the entire bill.
The bill starts out with a bunch of good sounding platitudes describing how it aims to ensure that Pennsylvania will get the best telecom services that Verizon decides it wants to deliver.
Oops, that's a bit sarcastic, but that's how I felt when I read this bill. Telecom bills like this are ostensibly for the good of the public but in actuality mostly benefit two monopolies: the regional telephone company and the utility regulators. There is very little in this bill that will benefit the ordinary citizens of Pennsylvania.
They will get higher prices and little innovation.
The bill includes some bribes to get specific groups to support it.
For example, it establishes an educational technology fund (the e-fund) to support things that educators like. The level and passion of support from some people in the educational community for the bill shows that this type of payoff works. Of course the money has to come from somewhere and it will come from higher phone costs for the residents of Pennsylvania.
In other words, the e-fund and other similar goodies in the bill are supported by yet another tax on telephone users.
What is missing is any hint that the best way to get innovation and lower prices would be to encourage competition for basic phone service. But that would threaten both of the bill's main beneficiaries.
This bill is the result of a perfect storm of telecom regulators and big telecom lobbyists. But this storm is a local squall in comparison with the Category 4 hurricane that will spring up when Congress starts to revamp federal telecom law. It will be very ugly, and you can be sure the beneficiaries will not be you and me.
By Scott Bradner
Network World, 12/06/04
Not far from Italian Telecom.
Italy signed the Geneva Telecom Act and we would be supposed to be free to use the 2.4 GHz frequency.
But the only allowed frequency is 26 GHz. that doesn't have any use or application.
That is for sure.
Could we really think to be able to infringe the Telecom Monopoly?
But that is not even the fault of the Telecom.
The fault is in those who agree that it is a shame, but do nothing to change it.
We have the world that the majority of us deserves to have...
Patrizia form a World on IP
Saturday, December 04, 2004
Are Smart Networks dumb or are Stupid Networks smart?
I would say none of the two.
Usually things aren't smart or dumb, but the people who make them can be.
We are facing a new revolution which will change the society in which we live.
Like in the French Revolution, nothing of what surrounds us will really change, but people's mentality and behavior will.
In 1790 the potatoes grew in the same way they used to in 1788, so the garlic, the onions and the tomatoes.
But the people who planted and ate them were living in a different way.
The Internet and the whole business of Communications will be the same, may be even worse in certain aspects, but the people who will run them will be different people.
You cannot concentrate the profits in the hands of a few and still expect that the mass has enough to pay for the services.
If the money is not shared, the one who produces will have to eat the whole production.
That is the simple mathematic law of economics and we are beginning to see how it works.
People do not have enough money to pay for what they are pushed to consume.
They borrow it.
So the producers earn on what they sell and on the money they lend to the people who consume.
Mathematic is made (and till now worked that way) that if you sell 2 and the one who buys 2 pays with 2 you make a profit of 1.
But if the one who pays 2 doesn't have any profit and borrows the 2, sooner or later will have to produce 2,50 to pay back the borrowed 2 plus interest.
But what happens if he cannot produce and earn anymore?
The one who sold 2 and lent 2 and is supposed to get back 2,50 won't get back anything.
As simple as that.
And this is the most logic explanation of what is going to happen in a very near future, unless a revolution takes place.
Profit must be shared, jobs must be available, investments must be done.
As simple as that.
No more big Monopolies, but thousands of small entrepreneurs.
No more restricted number of aristocratic investors, but thousand of middle class workers.
The working class of today is not motivated anymore.
Working for the salary is like studying for getting good marks.
It is not gratifying enough.
Human beings are made to work to create something, they must have a goal in life.
That is the lacking push in our society, in our economies.
Patrizia from a World on IP
Usually things aren't smart or dumb, but the people who make them can be.
We are facing a new revolution which will change the society in which we live.
Like in the French Revolution, nothing of what surrounds us will really change, but people's mentality and behavior will.
In 1790 the potatoes grew in the same way they used to in 1788, so the garlic, the onions and the tomatoes.
But the people who planted and ate them were living in a different way.
The Internet and the whole business of Communications will be the same, may be even worse in certain aspects, but the people who will run them will be different people.
You cannot concentrate the profits in the hands of a few and still expect that the mass has enough to pay for the services.
If the money is not shared, the one who produces will have to eat the whole production.
That is the simple mathematic law of economics and we are beginning to see how it works.
People do not have enough money to pay for what they are pushed to consume.
They borrow it.
So the producers earn on what they sell and on the money they lend to the people who consume.
Mathematic is made (and till now worked that way) that if you sell 2 and the one who buys 2 pays with 2 you make a profit of 1.
But if the one who pays 2 doesn't have any profit and borrows the 2, sooner or later will have to produce 2,50 to pay back the borrowed 2 plus interest.
But what happens if he cannot produce and earn anymore?
The one who sold 2 and lent 2 and is supposed to get back 2,50 won't get back anything.
As simple as that.
And this is the most logic explanation of what is going to happen in a very near future, unless a revolution takes place.
Profit must be shared, jobs must be available, investments must be done.
As simple as that.
No more big Monopolies, but thousands of small entrepreneurs.
No more restricted number of aristocratic investors, but thousand of middle class workers.
The working class of today is not motivated anymore.
Working for the salary is like studying for getting good marks.
It is not gratifying enough.
Human beings are made to work to create something, they must have a goal in life.
That is the lacking push in our society, in our economies.
Patrizia from a World on IP
Wednesday, December 01, 2004
The Zero Billion dollars business
I probably should say the Zero Billion Euros business, but since the amount is Zero, I do not think it makes that big difference.
I am talking about VoIP of course.
Why such a promising business doesn't make money, or makes much less than preview?
The only ones who make a little are the "Terminators".
But not even them anymore, since the fight has come to a point in which for every available customer you have at least two companies offering the "best rates".
What are the reasons?
1) First, let's have a look around to see who could be the possible customer.
Do not mix up telephony with VoIP.
Both deal with communication, but they are fundamentally different.
Telephony is a well established, mostly Monopoly's owned and state (politically) controlled business.
The infrastructure were already paid long ago by the customers, but still in the hands of the Monopoly, which plays at its own pleasure with them.
They can upgrade or lower the rates to what they find convenient and easily fight against the competition.
Is VoIP a threat to them?
I do not think so. The moment it will really be, then they will begin to be worried about.
I looked around me and asked myself: Who among my friends and relatives and acquaintances could be a possible customer of VoIP?
It was easy to count them, because they were so few.
In principle the normal people are not interested in long distance calls. No matter what number they report of Skype customers.
It is more like a fashion or a status symbol.
Very few young people do a lot of international calls and the national calls are much cheaper and better quality with a normal phone.
Why should they bother to use VoIP?
2) There are companies, and may be a lot of them, who could be relevant customers of VoIP, but they are still sleeping and many already tried the "best rates" and decided that it is undoubtedly great to speak for so cheap rates, but understanding each other, especially when you come to business, is more important.
To that you should also add the laziness and lack of interest or ignorance of most of the business (especially European) men and you have the complete scenario.
This is why till now VoIP is the Zero billion Euros business.
Patrizia from a World on IP
I am talking about VoIP of course.
Why such a promising business doesn't make money, or makes much less than preview?
The only ones who make a little are the "Terminators".
But not even them anymore, since the fight has come to a point in which for every available customer you have at least two companies offering the "best rates".
What are the reasons?
1) First, let's have a look around to see who could be the possible customer.
Do not mix up telephony with VoIP.
Both deal with communication, but they are fundamentally different.
Telephony is a well established, mostly Monopoly's owned and state (politically) controlled business.
The infrastructure were already paid long ago by the customers, but still in the hands of the Monopoly, which plays at its own pleasure with them.
They can upgrade or lower the rates to what they find convenient and easily fight against the competition.
Is VoIP a threat to them?
I do not think so. The moment it will really be, then they will begin to be worried about.
I looked around me and asked myself: Who among my friends and relatives and acquaintances could be a possible customer of VoIP?
It was easy to count them, because they were so few.
In principle the normal people are not interested in long distance calls. No matter what number they report of Skype customers.
It is more like a fashion or a status symbol.
Very few young people do a lot of international calls and the national calls are much cheaper and better quality with a normal phone.
Why should they bother to use VoIP?
2) There are companies, and may be a lot of them, who could be relevant customers of VoIP, but they are still sleeping and many already tried the "best rates" and decided that it is undoubtedly great to speak for so cheap rates, but understanding each other, especially when you come to business, is more important.
To that you should also add the laziness and lack of interest or ignorance of most of the business (especially European) men and you have the complete scenario.
This is why till now VoIP is the Zero billion Euros business.
Patrizia from a World on IP
Sunday, November 28, 2004
The Chinese (supposed) nonsense
SHANGHAI -- The long lunch-hour lines at this city's downtown Bank of China are filled with people who not long ago stuffed their accounts with U.S.
currency. Now they are dumping dollars.
Yuan Man, ticket No. 252 in line, has set aside more than $50,000 to support his son's dream to study in the U.S., but regrets not holding a stronger euro, or even a firm yen. Ron Chen, an Australian pharmaceutical executive, is paid monthly in dollars and converts each paycheck immediately into yuan . A middle-aged woman and her elderly mother sit nearby awaiting the arrival of an overseas wire transfer. They, too, plan to get rid of their dollars the same day.
"The dollar doesn't mean anything anymore," says the woman.
From black marketers to anxious grandmothers, Chinese have become disenchanted with the dollar. The selling has posed problems for Beijing as it tries to keep the yuan pegged to the dollar, adding to pressure China is getting from its trading partners to revalue its currency.
The selling also signals a startling shift that may have damaging implications for the dollar down the line: Many Chinese view the yuan , also called the renminbi, as the safer currency to hold.
"The U.S. dollar is weakening! The renminbi is the hard currency now!"
shouts a 40-year old man after pulling $10,000 out of U.S.-dollar-denominated stocks and plunking the sum into yuan deposits.
"It's the best choice," he says.
"This kind of fight between the eater and the eaten never goes so far that the predator causes extinction of the prey: a state of equilibrium is always established between them, endurable by both species.
What directly threatens the existence of an animal species is never the "eating enemy" but the competitors."
The lack of "prey" would be the lack of food and would mean subsequently the death warranty of the "predator".
Admitting the forwarded scenario, the Chinese would abandon the dollar, this would create a very strong alternative currency (let's think the Euro).
But this would sign their death warranty.
The Chinese more than the rest of the world rely their successful economy on exports, when the dollar will be too weak and the Americans too poor, when the Euro will be too strong and the European economy at the bottom: Where will they export?
What directly threatens the existence of an animal species is never the "eating enemy".
The Chinese know (or should know) too well the next scenario.
Patrizia from a World on IP
currency. Now they are dumping dollars.
Yuan Man, ticket No. 252 in line, has set aside more than $50,000 to support his son's dream to study in the U.S., but regrets not holding a stronger euro, or even a firm yen. Ron Chen, an Australian pharmaceutical executive, is paid monthly in dollars and converts each paycheck immediately into yuan . A middle-aged woman and her elderly mother sit nearby awaiting the arrival of an overseas wire transfer. They, too, plan to get rid of their dollars the same day.
"The dollar doesn't mean anything anymore," says the woman.
From black marketers to anxious grandmothers, Chinese have become disenchanted with the dollar. The selling has posed problems for Beijing as it tries to keep the yuan pegged to the dollar, adding to pressure China is getting from its trading partners to revalue its currency.
The selling also signals a startling shift that may have damaging implications for the dollar down the line: Many Chinese view the yuan , also called the renminbi, as the safer currency to hold.
"The U.S. dollar is weakening! The renminbi is the hard currency now!"
shouts a 40-year old man after pulling $10,000 out of U.S.-dollar-denominated stocks and plunking the sum into yuan deposits.
"It's the best choice," he says.
"This kind of fight between the eater and the eaten never goes so far that the predator causes extinction of the prey: a state of equilibrium is always established between them, endurable by both species.
What directly threatens the existence of an animal species is never the "eating enemy" but the competitors."
The lack of "prey" would be the lack of food and would mean subsequently the death warranty of the "predator".
Admitting the forwarded scenario, the Chinese would abandon the dollar, this would create a very strong alternative currency (let's think the Euro).
But this would sign their death warranty.
The Chinese more than the rest of the world rely their successful economy on exports, when the dollar will be too weak and the Americans too poor, when the Euro will be too strong and the European economy at the bottom: Where will they export?
What directly threatens the existence of an animal species is never the "eating enemy".
The Chinese know (or should know) too well the next scenario.
Patrizia from a World on IP
Monday, November 15, 2004
Are Stupid Networks a Smart Idea?
If you start from the assumption that "Economics really do matter" and you come to the conclusion that the "Smart networks" at least feed a lot of people, while the "Dumb Network" as far as today didn't make any millionaire, well we could think that the Stupid Networks Is NOT a good idea at all.
Bur then, when they invented the textile machines, since they created a drastic change in the society, and of course reduced millions of people on the verge of starving, one could have come to the conclusion that Progress is not in the interest of the Economy and even more, not in the interest of the society.
In principle a computer can steal thousand of jobs, so that it probably would have been better not to invent it.
And we could go on for hours.
But we ALL know that Progress is something almost as definitive as birth and death.
We are born, we progress and we die.
Period.
Patrizia from a World on IP
Bur then, when they invented the textile machines, since they created a drastic change in the society, and of course reduced millions of people on the verge of starving, one could have come to the conclusion that Progress is not in the interest of the Economy and even more, not in the interest of the society.
In principle a computer can steal thousand of jobs, so that it probably would have been better not to invent it.
And we could go on for hours.
But we ALL know that Progress is something almost as definitive as birth and death.
We are born, we progress and we die.
Period.
Patrizia from a World on IP
Wednesday, November 03, 2004
Why
Life imitates fiction, people like fiction, people want to live in fiction, life is a fiction.
That explains America's voting, that explains why Bush won.
In life usually what wins is not necessarily the best, but surely is the "best commercialized".
Life is a big advertising and nobody cares to know if it really is what they say it is.
The important is to "have"it.
Our society is the society of the "must have" at any cost.
And the "must have" of what is best commercialized.
It works this way: the people who want to sell create the need, find the best solution and offer, advertise it, and people buy.
It doesn't really matter what it is.
A car, a TV, a Plasma screen, a new GSM, a president, a movie, whatever.
They know what words to use.
When you want to sell something you do not need to be an expert, you do not need to know what you are selling, you need to know psychology, how people think and behave and you are done.
Let the best win.
That is it for today.
Patrizia from a World on IP
That explains America's voting, that explains why Bush won.
In life usually what wins is not necessarily the best, but surely is the "best commercialized".
Life is a big advertising and nobody cares to know if it really is what they say it is.
The important is to "have"it.
Our society is the society of the "must have" at any cost.
And the "must have" of what is best commercialized.
It works this way: the people who want to sell create the need, find the best solution and offer, advertise it, and people buy.
It doesn't really matter what it is.
A car, a TV, a Plasma screen, a new GSM, a president, a movie, whatever.
They know what words to use.
When you want to sell something you do not need to be an expert, you do not need to know what you are selling, you need to know psychology, how people think and behave and you are done.
Let the best win.
That is it for today.
Patrizia from a World on IP
Wednesday, October 27, 2004
Life imitates Fiction
People tell us that movie makes us love life more than we loved it before; that it reveals its secrets to us; and that we see things in it that had escaped our observation.
The more we enjoy the movies, the less we care for reality.
What show really reveals to us is life's lack of design, its curious crudities, its extraordinary monotony, its absolutely unfinished condition. Reality has good intentions, of course, but, as Aristotle once said, she cannot carry them out.
As for the infinite variety of life, that is a pure myth.
It is not to be found in reality itself.
It resides in the imagination, or fancy, or cultivated blindness of the man who looks at it.
Nature is so uncomfortable. Grass is hard and lumpy and damp, and full of dreadful black insects.
If reality had been comfortable, mankind would never have invented architecture, and I prefer houses to the open air.
In a house we all feel of the proper proportions.
Everything is subordinated to us, fashioned for our use and our pleasure.
Egotism itself, which is so necessary to a proper sense of human dignity, is entirely the result of indoor life. Out of doors one becomes abstract and impersonal.
One's individuality absolutely leaves one.
And then reality is so indifferent, so unappreciative.
Nothing is more evident than that reality hates Mind.
Thinking is the most unhealthy thing in the world, and people die of it just as they die of any other disease.
Fortunately thought is not catching.
Our splendid physique as a people is entirely due to our stupidity.
I only hope we shall be able to keep this great historic bulwark of our happiness for many years to come; but I am afraid that we are beginning to be over-educated; at least everybody who is incapable of learning has taken to teaching - that is really what our enthusiasm for education has come to.
Paradox though it may seem - and paradoxes are always dangerous things - it is none the less true that Life imitates movies far more than movies imitates life.
A great director invents a type, and Life tries to copy it, to reproduce it in a popular form, like an enterprising publisher.
As it is with the visible arts, so it is with literature.
The most obvious and the vulgarest form in which this is shown is in the case of the silly boys who, after reading the adventures of somebody imitate him.
This interesting phenomenon, is usually attributed to the influence of literature on the imagination.
But this is a mistake.
The imagination is essentially creative, and always seeks for a new form.
The boy-whatever is simply the inevitable result of life's imitative instinct.
He is Fact, occupied as Fact usually is, with trying to reproduce Fiction, and what we see in him is repeated on an extended scale throughout the whole of life.
Schopenhauer has analysed the pessimism that characterises modern thought, but Hamlet invented it.
The world has become sad because a puppet was once melancholy.
The Nihilist, that strange martyr who has no faith, who goes to the stake without enthusiasm, and dies for what he does not believe in, is a purely literary product.
He was invented by Tourgenieff, and completed by Dostoieffski.
Personal experience is a most vicious and limited circle.
All that I desire to point out is the general principle that Life imitates Show far more than Show imitates Life, and I feel sure that if you think seriously about it you will find that it is true.
Life holds the mirror up to Show, and either reproduces some strange type imagined by painter or sculptor, or realises in fact what has been dreamed in fiction. Scientifically speaking, the basis of life - the energy of life, as Aristotle would call it - is simply the desire for expression, and Art is always presenting various forms through which this expression can be attained. Life seizes on them and uses them, even if they be to it own hurt. Young men have committed suicide because somebody in the fiction did so, have died by their own hand because by his own hand Werther died. Think of what we owe to the imitation of Christ, of what we owe to the imitation of Caesar.
Where, if not from the Impressionists, do we get those wonderful brown fogs that come creeping down our streets, blurring the gas-lamps and changing the houses into monstrous shadows?
To whom, if not to them and their master, do we owe the lovely silver mists that brood over our river, and turn to faint forms of fading grace curved bridge and swaying barge?
Rove, however, is more than a political sharpie with a bulging bag of dirty tricks. His campaign shenanigans — past and future — go to the heart of what this election is about.
Nothing else than the mirror of our life: a reality trying to imitate fiction..
Liberally taken from Oscar Wilde
The more we enjoy the movies, the less we care for reality.
What show really reveals to us is life's lack of design, its curious crudities, its extraordinary monotony, its absolutely unfinished condition. Reality has good intentions, of course, but, as Aristotle once said, she cannot carry them out.
As for the infinite variety of life, that is a pure myth.
It is not to be found in reality itself.
It resides in the imagination, or fancy, or cultivated blindness of the man who looks at it.
Nature is so uncomfortable. Grass is hard and lumpy and damp, and full of dreadful black insects.
If reality had been comfortable, mankind would never have invented architecture, and I prefer houses to the open air.
In a house we all feel of the proper proportions.
Everything is subordinated to us, fashioned for our use and our pleasure.
Egotism itself, which is so necessary to a proper sense of human dignity, is entirely the result of indoor life. Out of doors one becomes abstract and impersonal.
One's individuality absolutely leaves one.
And then reality is so indifferent, so unappreciative.
Nothing is more evident than that reality hates Mind.
Thinking is the most unhealthy thing in the world, and people die of it just as they die of any other disease.
Fortunately thought is not catching.
Our splendid physique as a people is entirely due to our stupidity.
I only hope we shall be able to keep this great historic bulwark of our happiness for many years to come; but I am afraid that we are beginning to be over-educated; at least everybody who is incapable of learning has taken to teaching - that is really what our enthusiasm for education has come to.
Paradox though it may seem - and paradoxes are always dangerous things - it is none the less true that Life imitates movies far more than movies imitates life.
A great director invents a type, and Life tries to copy it, to reproduce it in a popular form, like an enterprising publisher.
As it is with the visible arts, so it is with literature.
The most obvious and the vulgarest form in which this is shown is in the case of the silly boys who, after reading the adventures of somebody imitate him.
This interesting phenomenon, is usually attributed to the influence of literature on the imagination.
But this is a mistake.
The imagination is essentially creative, and always seeks for a new form.
The boy-whatever is simply the inevitable result of life's imitative instinct.
He is Fact, occupied as Fact usually is, with trying to reproduce Fiction, and what we see in him is repeated on an extended scale throughout the whole of life.
Schopenhauer has analysed the pessimism that characterises modern thought, but Hamlet invented it.
The world has become sad because a puppet was once melancholy.
The Nihilist, that strange martyr who has no faith, who goes to the stake without enthusiasm, and dies for what he does not believe in, is a purely literary product.
He was invented by Tourgenieff, and completed by Dostoieffski.
Personal experience is a most vicious and limited circle.
All that I desire to point out is the general principle that Life imitates Show far more than Show imitates Life, and I feel sure that if you think seriously about it you will find that it is true.
Life holds the mirror up to Show, and either reproduces some strange type imagined by painter or sculptor, or realises in fact what has been dreamed in fiction. Scientifically speaking, the basis of life - the energy of life, as Aristotle would call it - is simply the desire for expression, and Art is always presenting various forms through which this expression can be attained. Life seizes on them and uses them, even if they be to it own hurt. Young men have committed suicide because somebody in the fiction did so, have died by their own hand because by his own hand Werther died. Think of what we owe to the imitation of Christ, of what we owe to the imitation of Caesar.
Where, if not from the Impressionists, do we get those wonderful brown fogs that come creeping down our streets, blurring the gas-lamps and changing the houses into monstrous shadows?
To whom, if not to them and their master, do we owe the lovely silver mists that brood over our river, and turn to faint forms of fading grace curved bridge and swaying barge?
Rove, however, is more than a political sharpie with a bulging bag of dirty tricks. His campaign shenanigans — past and future — go to the heart of what this election is about.
Nothing else than the mirror of our life: a reality trying to imitate fiction..
Liberally taken from Oscar Wilde
Saturday, October 16, 2004
More on the Less
Monopoly means that there is one class that takes all the advantages and makes it impossible for the others to enter the Market.
One way is having the Governments "on their side" with suitable laws and regulations.
That is what has happened and is happening in the last century.
Progress would mean to let a new class of entrepreneurs to enter the market, giving the same opportunities to all.
In the moment they can charge millions of dollars for a frequency, that has the consequence to restrict the number of available investors to a few, to a "monopoly" of big companies that on their side will get back the money invested adding a nice sum to it.
They won't create new jobs, they won't distribute the wealth.
They will reinvest their profits to increase their monopolies in our fields, so that the all world will belong to a few...
In 1789 they had a similar situation.
A bunch of few Kings and Nobles ruled the world of that time, they didn't create jobs, they didn't share their wealth.
Their main interest was being able to create new money to be able to spend and waste more.
History repeats itself.
It is just a matter of time. And it is always the same, nobody ever understands the lesson of History.
Besides all, they keep forgetting the most important, that the people vote for somebody to be "represented" from that somebody and not to be "ruled".
The first case goes under the name of "Democracy" the other under the name "Tyranny or Dictatorship".
And it is funny how the people wash their mouth with big words like "democracy" and then, when they are in charge, they completely forget the meaning.
The air is something that belongs to the people and no nation, no government has the right to "regulate" and forbid the use of it.
The world belongs to the people who live in it and the moment somebody tells you, that you have to pay for what belongs to you, then something must be terribly wrong.
Monopoly is the father of our century, but Freedom is the mother of our future.
Patrizia form a World on IP
One way is having the Governments "on their side" with suitable laws and regulations.
That is what has happened and is happening in the last century.
Progress would mean to let a new class of entrepreneurs to enter the market, giving the same opportunities to all.
In the moment they can charge millions of dollars for a frequency, that has the consequence to restrict the number of available investors to a few, to a "monopoly" of big companies that on their side will get back the money invested adding a nice sum to it.
They won't create new jobs, they won't distribute the wealth.
They will reinvest their profits to increase their monopolies in our fields, so that the all world will belong to a few...
In 1789 they had a similar situation.
A bunch of few Kings and Nobles ruled the world of that time, they didn't create jobs, they didn't share their wealth.
Their main interest was being able to create new money to be able to spend and waste more.
History repeats itself.
It is just a matter of time. And it is always the same, nobody ever understands the lesson of History.
Besides all, they keep forgetting the most important, that the people vote for somebody to be "represented" from that somebody and not to be "ruled".
The first case goes under the name of "Democracy" the other under the name "Tyranny or Dictatorship".
And it is funny how the people wash their mouth with big words like "democracy" and then, when they are in charge, they completely forget the meaning.
The air is something that belongs to the people and no nation, no government has the right to "regulate" and forbid the use of it.
The world belongs to the people who live in it and the moment somebody tells you, that you have to pay for what belongs to you, then something must be terribly wrong.
Monopoly is the father of our century, but Freedom is the mother of our future.
Patrizia form a World on IP
Thursday, October 14, 2004
The Unimportance of having a Union
EU stands for European Union, that would mean the Union of the Europeans, but nothing could be more misleading.
Where do you see any Union?
We still speak a too big amount of different languages, we still have a too big quantity of different law, we still think too much as "Non Europeans".
That means all the money we spend (a huge amount) to run the EU is nothing else than money thrown away or to be more précised, too much money finished in the wrong pockets.
EU is more the Union of governments that should be representative of their people, but are so far away from them, that they do not even know anymore what people want.
What they know and quite well, is to suck inventing everyday new taxes in the name of the Progressive EU.
Let's say, as if we were not enough squeezed from our local governments, they felt the need to create something higher and bigger to suck more.
And all in the name of higher progress and higher justice.
Then, when you need a little bit of something you do not even know where to knock.
Which is not worse than knowing where to knock, because, anyway nobody would answer you.
The EU unites crooks and is a legal institution.
The Internet unites people and it is an unofficial institution, it is not even an institution, that is why it works.
When will those politicians understand it has come the time to begin to be ashamed of themselves?
Patrizia from a World on IP
Where do you see any Union?
We still speak a too big amount of different languages, we still have a too big quantity of different law, we still think too much as "Non Europeans".
That means all the money we spend (a huge amount) to run the EU is nothing else than money thrown away or to be more précised, too much money finished in the wrong pockets.
EU is more the Union of governments that should be representative of their people, but are so far away from them, that they do not even know anymore what people want.
What they know and quite well, is to suck inventing everyday new taxes in the name of the Progressive EU.
Let's say, as if we were not enough squeezed from our local governments, they felt the need to create something higher and bigger to suck more.
And all in the name of higher progress and higher justice.
Then, when you need a little bit of something you do not even know where to knock.
Which is not worse than knowing where to knock, because, anyway nobody would answer you.
The EU unites crooks and is a legal institution.
The Internet unites people and it is an unofficial institution, it is not even an institution, that is why it works.
When will those politicians understand it has come the time to begin to be ashamed of themselves?
Patrizia from a World on IP
Wednesday, October 13, 2004
The State should be at the service of the citizens and not the other way round.
"Broadcasting was the first major commercial wireless service, quickly eclipsing point-to-point and ship-to-shore links.
Beginning with radio, it developed early in the 20th century.
Therefore, it occupies huge swaths of spectrum at what today we consider low frequencies. Newer services, such as microwave relays for telecommunications backhaul, mobile telephony, satellite transmission, and wireless data, tend to operate higher on the frequency dial.
This segmentation is partly a simple historical progression.
Like the sedimentary layers of archaeological digs, wireless services generally follow a progression of frequencies from low to high over time.
Newer technologies can support usable systems at higher and higher frequencies.
Frequency does matter.
Generally speaking, the lower the frequency, the better a signal propagates.
Lower frequencies make it easier to build systems that transmit over long distances, allowing for fewer transmitters and thus lower costs to cover a given area.
They also allow signals to more easily penetrate obstacles such as trees and walls.
These characteristics are particularly valuable for services such as last-mile broadband.
Unlicensed wireless systems based on the WiFi standard and operating in the 2.4 and 5 GHz bands have experienced dramatic market growth in recent years. Newer technologies such as WiMax (IEEE 802.16) and MobileFi (IEEE 802.20) promise higher capacity and mobility.
Meanwhile, demand for broadband data connections continues to grow worldwide. Broadband is not only a revenue-generating service on its own; it is the platform for a plethora of new applications such as voice over IP, movie downloads, videoconferencing, and multi-player online gaming.
To address broadband demand, low-frequency wireless capacity now allocated to broadcasting should be made available for wireless data services. "
Why?
For the simple reason that this is what people want.
And that the politicians who are voted to be there, are voted to "represent" the citizens and not to favor the Monopolies in the advantage of their pockets.
The State should be at the service of the citizens and not the other way round.
Period
Beginning with radio, it developed early in the 20th century.
Therefore, it occupies huge swaths of spectrum at what today we consider low frequencies. Newer services, such as microwave relays for telecommunications backhaul, mobile telephony, satellite transmission, and wireless data, tend to operate higher on the frequency dial.
This segmentation is partly a simple historical progression.
Like the sedimentary layers of archaeological digs, wireless services generally follow a progression of frequencies from low to high over time.
Newer technologies can support usable systems at higher and higher frequencies.
Frequency does matter.
Generally speaking, the lower the frequency, the better a signal propagates.
Lower frequencies make it easier to build systems that transmit over long distances, allowing for fewer transmitters and thus lower costs to cover a given area.
They also allow signals to more easily penetrate obstacles such as trees and walls.
These characteristics are particularly valuable for services such as last-mile broadband.
Unlicensed wireless systems based on the WiFi standard and operating in the 2.4 and 5 GHz bands have experienced dramatic market growth in recent years. Newer technologies such as WiMax (IEEE 802.16) and MobileFi (IEEE 802.20) promise higher capacity and mobility.
Meanwhile, demand for broadband data connections continues to grow worldwide. Broadband is not only a revenue-generating service on its own; it is the platform for a plethora of new applications such as voice over IP, movie downloads, videoconferencing, and multi-player online gaming.
To address broadband demand, low-frequency wireless capacity now allocated to broadcasting should be made available for wireless data services. "
Why?
For the simple reason that this is what people want.
And that the politicians who are voted to be there, are voted to "represent" the citizens and not to favor the Monopolies in the advantage of their pockets.
The State should be at the service of the citizens and not the other way round.
Period
Tuesday, October 12, 2004
The father of our Era is Monopoly, but the mother of our Future is Freedom.
Angioplasty for the narrowed vessel between the Internet and the premises is available.
The surgery -- replacing ancient copper with fiber optics and other more recent technologies -- would be cost-effective, and its benefit to end users of the Internet would be immediate.
But Local Exchange Carriers (the telcos) and the cable industry (the cablecos) will not consent to this surgery because they are afraid for their lives.
Indeed, in a world of high-speed connections and end-to-end Internet, the cablecos and telcos would have very little to sell.
But regardless of explanation, transmission technologies are available that might otherwise eliminate the worst constrictions in data capacity are not being deployed.
These are not limited to fiber; upgrades are available for DSL and Cable Modems that could boost their speeds by as much as 100x.
These are in active use (and rapid deployment) in countries such as Korea, Japan and Iceland.
But the rest of the World is stuck in a regime of slow access; a duocracy where telcos and cablecos rule.
Wireless technology can be a way to break the cableco/telco duopoly.
"Magical things happen in competitive markets when there are at least three viable, facilities-based competitors. And we are looking to wireless to help deliver that Triple Crown."
A substantial spectrum reallocation is called for.
The current system is extraordinarily inefficient and inadequate for the challenge of stimulating innovative new services and business models. It also perpetuates the traditional and deeply awed bias in favor of content instead of connectivity.
A proper spectrum reallocation would promote new services directly, and would speed up the developing restructuring of telecommunications.
In addition, it would also help disprove many myths that are hobbling this vital industry.
The current spectrum allocation system is deeply awed. Even if it was appropriate decades ago, given the primitive wireless technologies that were available at that time, it is obsolete.
Although technology has changed dramatically over the centuries, economics, psychology, and sociology have not, and many of the issues we face today are fundamentally the same ones faced by society in the past when faced with some previous novel technologies.
A key issue is the degree of control that service providers should have.
To what extent should their technology or business model choices be constrained by government?
Wireless can play a major role in stimulating competition, both indirectly (through voice traffic ) and directly, by providing an alternative broadband link, and thus leading to real facilities based competition.
Right now, voice traffic, which is where most of the money continues to come from, is just beginning to move from wireline to wireless transmission.
In the long run, we should expect almost all voice to be carried by wireless links (at least for the first segment), as fiber will continue to be used for long haul and even in metro areas, where traffic can be.
In addition, broadband wireless access to the Internet is increasingly proving itself to be feasible, as the technology improves faster than residential users' demand for bandwidth.
That is extremely encouraging, since scaling properties of wireless deployments are far more favorable than any wireline technology.
The main costs tend to depend primarily on the number of subscribers, and not on the number of households in the area.
Therefore it is feasible to provide service in areas with low density of subscribers, and also to have multiple competing operators.
Technology has been lowering the costs of providing all telecom services.
Stock market valuations in the telecom sector are still in most cases far ahead of replacement values , and so apparently anticipate monopoly profits.
Under these conditions, the best public policy would be to be on the side of encouraging competition and innovation, and not of protecting existing carriers.
That has worked well in South Korea, and should work in the rest of the World as well.
Promoting diffusion of general broadband access is desirable, and can be facilitated by promoting wireless communication.
But there are two even more important reasons for advancing wireless and in particular for making more spectrum available for it.
One is that mobility, which is what wireless provides, is extremely valuable, and offers the promise of major boosts to economic productivity.
The other one is that the telecom industry is shackled by a set of misleading myths.
These myths impede the necessary restructuring of the industry.
In very rough terms, and using an analogy with the computer industry, the telecom sector appears to be pining for and planning to restore the mainframe to its dominant form, instead of adjusting to the distributed computing era.
Greater promotion of wireless connectivity, especially in ways that enable local innovation, would serve to demonstrate what users really need from telecom, and speed up the evolution of this sector.
For wireless to fulfill its promise, more spectrum for connectivity services is called for.
Yes, technology is advancing, but there are limits to what can be done with it, especially at reasonable cost and in the near term.
In particular, low frequencies are and for the foreseeable future will remain far more desirable for connectivity than high frequencies.
Far too much of this valuable spectrum has been assigned to broadcasting, the result of a confluence of technologies available many decades ago and one of the key myths to be discussed later, namely that content is king. Moreover, much of it is simply not being used.
It is time to redirect it more productively, towards connectivity services.
For much of the spectrum, the government prescribes not just the technology, but even the applications that can use it.
Most of the spectrum is idle, as the envisaged applications have not developed as anticipated. (In particular, much of the spectrum set aside for broadcasting is not being used.)
The only spectrum that there is any hope of reclaiming any time soon is that given to broadcasters as part of the digital transition, since it was given with explicit mandate of returning it back to the public.
The political obstacles that exist in the way of reclaiming even those frequency bands demonstrate how hard it will be to rationalize the entire system by simple government reallocation whenever there are any actual users.
That would allow other enterprises with more productive uses for the spectrum to take over.
If this is done, the amount of licensed spectrum available for connectivity services will grow substantially.
What is most amazing is that many of the misleading myths that shackle the telecom industry have been recurring in history.
It appears that often it takes hard experience for service providers to discover the right solutions.
Fortunately that can happen.
As an example, it does appear that as a result of its leadership in broadband as well as cellular usage, South Korea has unlearned some of these myths.
For example, the myths that content is king and that killer apps are required no longer dominate:
The killer application of the Internet is speed," said Lee Yong Kyung, the chief
executive of the KT Corporation, formerly known as Korea Telecom, which controls nearly half of the country's broadband market.
The money is in the pipes."
On the other hand, Korea still appears to be in thrall to the myth of streaming real-time multimedia.
Carriers can develop innovative new services
There is no serious evidence to support this myth.
In spite of many attempts, the established service providers and their suppliers have an abysmal record in innovation in user services.
The real killer apps such as email, the Web, browsers, search engines, IM, and Napster, have all come from users.
Is there any reason to expect the future to be any different?
If anything, we should expect an even greater fraction of innovations to come from users at the edges of the network.
We are experiencing several types of convergence, of computing and communications, of content and connectivity, and so on.
Hence the variety of services will be growing, and the ranks of potential creators of those services will also be growing.
It will require ever more knowledge of what users need to take advantage of the growing opportunities, and we can't expect centralized organizations to be able to do it.
Content is king
One of the oldest, most wildly held, and most damaging myths is that content is king.
Content has never been as large or as important as connectivity, person-to-person communication.
The myth of content as king has repeatedly led telecoms to waste huge amounts
of money trying to get into the content business.
Yet providing pipes for connectivity has always brought much more revenue than content distribution.
The myth of content as king is also behind much of the movement to enact harmfully restrictive copyright laws.
Voice is irrelevant
Voice is still what provides well over 70% of telecom service revenues.
In particular, the real telecom success story of the 1990s, whether measured in terms of revenue growth or number of subscribers, was in wireless voice, not on the Internet .
The greatest neglected opportunity, though, is in the wireless voice quality area.
The current quality of cellular voice is basically abysmal, just barely tolerable.
There are some signs that the wireless industry is beginning to realize that voice will be the main application of 3G.
But this recognition is late and slow.
The importance of voice leads to the relative unattractiveness of videotelephony.
But whatever the reasons, videotelephony is not a killer app, and we should expect slow growth in it.
Videoconferencing is likely to be accepted more widely, but is not likely to generate much traffic.
Videoconferencing leads to one of the minor and relatively innocuous myths of telecom.
While telecommuting and videoconferencing are likely to grow, that will not reduce road congestion.
There is this strangely persistent myth that telecommunications and transportation are substitutes for each other.
They are not, and are in fact positively correlated.
Hence we should expect growth of travel at the same time as telecom usage is booming.
Therefore, as had been predicted a long time ago by Negroponte, Gilder, and others, it makes much more sense to deliver content (which is, after all, prepared by experts for wide consumption) as files for local storage, replay, and transfer.
(Hardly any content in this definition requires the synchronicity of voice or videotelephony.)
The future of multimedia traffic is not just in file transfers, but also in faster-than-real-time file transfers. This seems to be almost completely missed by the telecom industry.
So the phenomenon of faster-than-real-time transmission has already become dominant, but the industry is not aware of it, and certainly does not understand it.
What are the advantages of faster-than-real-time transmission of multimedia?
There are a variety of them.
Among others, such transmission makes QoS unnecessary, it caters to human impatience, it allows natural behavior, such as quick download followed by a quick transfer to a portable device to take on a trip, and it allows for a natural progression, starting with slower-than-real-time when you don't have the bandwidth, and then moving up to faster-than-real-time. But the industry is still concentrating on developing technologies for streaming real-time delivery.
An American expert on streaming multimedia technology who spent the summer of 2003 in South Korea, working with researchers there, reports that even the Koreans see no reason for ever going much beyond 50 Mbps to the home.
After all, that would provide for several HDTV channels, and all the Web surfing and email anyone could want.
But with faster-than-real-time file transfers, it is easy to envisage demand arising for bigger pipes.
Information technology still has a long way to do in terms of diffusing through society, and that will continue generating additional traffic.
This is not to argue that there won't be any new applications that will be called killer apps," or that one should not look for them, but the general conclusion is that there is no need to rely on their discovery.
The Internet is often cited for erasing the gaps created by physical distance.
But that is a misleading notion.
While the Internet traffic so far has been rather independent of distance, that is likely to change substantially, to fall into the pattern of other communication services, which have been and continue to be primarily local .
One sign of that is in reports from Korea that less than 5% of their Internet traffic goes outside that country.
With convergence of consumer electronics, business information technology, telecommunications, and content, the action will be at the edges, in homes and businesses, melding all these elements together.
It will be local communication that will need to be provided in profusion, in order to allow for easy implementations of new services.
The telecom industry does not appreciate the need to encourage usage.
Technology is advancing, so bandwidth is growing, and the service providers that will win will be the ones who teach their customers how to use the increasing capacity of their links.
And nothing helps whet the appetite for bandwidth as much as flat rates and not having to worry about priorities and the like.
Expanding the spectrum that is available for connectivity, as opposed to broadcast, would not only respond to the urgent need for local mobility in communications, but would indirectly aid the whole sector by demonstrating what it is that is truly needed.
The surgery -- replacing ancient copper with fiber optics and other more recent technologies -- would be cost-effective, and its benefit to end users of the Internet would be immediate.
But Local Exchange Carriers (the telcos) and the cable industry (the cablecos) will not consent to this surgery because they are afraid for their lives.
Indeed, in a world of high-speed connections and end-to-end Internet, the cablecos and telcos would have very little to sell.
But regardless of explanation, transmission technologies are available that might otherwise eliminate the worst constrictions in data capacity are not being deployed.
These are not limited to fiber; upgrades are available for DSL and Cable Modems that could boost their speeds by as much as 100x.
These are in active use (and rapid deployment) in countries such as Korea, Japan and Iceland.
But the rest of the World is stuck in a regime of slow access; a duocracy where telcos and cablecos rule.
Wireless technology can be a way to break the cableco/telco duopoly.
"Magical things happen in competitive markets when there are at least three viable, facilities-based competitors. And we are looking to wireless to help deliver that Triple Crown."
A substantial spectrum reallocation is called for.
The current system is extraordinarily inefficient and inadequate for the challenge of stimulating innovative new services and business models. It also perpetuates the traditional and deeply awed bias in favor of content instead of connectivity.
A proper spectrum reallocation would promote new services directly, and would speed up the developing restructuring of telecommunications.
In addition, it would also help disprove many myths that are hobbling this vital industry.
The current spectrum allocation system is deeply awed. Even if it was appropriate decades ago, given the primitive wireless technologies that were available at that time, it is obsolete.
Although technology has changed dramatically over the centuries, economics, psychology, and sociology have not, and many of the issues we face today are fundamentally the same ones faced by society in the past when faced with some previous novel technologies.
A key issue is the degree of control that service providers should have.
To what extent should their technology or business model choices be constrained by government?
Wireless can play a major role in stimulating competition, both indirectly (through voice traffic ) and directly, by providing an alternative broadband link, and thus leading to real facilities based competition.
Right now, voice traffic, which is where most of the money continues to come from, is just beginning to move from wireline to wireless transmission.
In the long run, we should expect almost all voice to be carried by wireless links (at least for the first segment), as fiber will continue to be used for long haul and even in metro areas, where traffic can be.
In addition, broadband wireless access to the Internet is increasingly proving itself to be feasible, as the technology improves faster than residential users' demand for bandwidth.
That is extremely encouraging, since scaling properties of wireless deployments are far more favorable than any wireline technology.
The main costs tend to depend primarily on the number of subscribers, and not on the number of households in the area.
Therefore it is feasible to provide service in areas with low density of subscribers, and also to have multiple competing operators.
Technology has been lowering the costs of providing all telecom services.
Stock market valuations in the telecom sector are still in most cases far ahead of replacement values , and so apparently anticipate monopoly profits.
Under these conditions, the best public policy would be to be on the side of encouraging competition and innovation, and not of protecting existing carriers.
That has worked well in South Korea, and should work in the rest of the World as well.
Promoting diffusion of general broadband access is desirable, and can be facilitated by promoting wireless communication.
But there are two even more important reasons for advancing wireless and in particular for making more spectrum available for it.
One is that mobility, which is what wireless provides, is extremely valuable, and offers the promise of major boosts to economic productivity.
The other one is that the telecom industry is shackled by a set of misleading myths.
These myths impede the necessary restructuring of the industry.
In very rough terms, and using an analogy with the computer industry, the telecom sector appears to be pining for and planning to restore the mainframe to its dominant form, instead of adjusting to the distributed computing era.
Greater promotion of wireless connectivity, especially in ways that enable local innovation, would serve to demonstrate what users really need from telecom, and speed up the evolution of this sector.
For wireless to fulfill its promise, more spectrum for connectivity services is called for.
Yes, technology is advancing, but there are limits to what can be done with it, especially at reasonable cost and in the near term.
In particular, low frequencies are and for the foreseeable future will remain far more desirable for connectivity than high frequencies.
Far too much of this valuable spectrum has been assigned to broadcasting, the result of a confluence of technologies available many decades ago and one of the key myths to be discussed later, namely that content is king. Moreover, much of it is simply not being used.
It is time to redirect it more productively, towards connectivity services.
For much of the spectrum, the government prescribes not just the technology, but even the applications that can use it.
Most of the spectrum is idle, as the envisaged applications have not developed as anticipated. (In particular, much of the spectrum set aside for broadcasting is not being used.)
The only spectrum that there is any hope of reclaiming any time soon is that given to broadcasters as part of the digital transition, since it was given with explicit mandate of returning it back to the public.
The political obstacles that exist in the way of reclaiming even those frequency bands demonstrate how hard it will be to rationalize the entire system by simple government reallocation whenever there are any actual users.
That would allow other enterprises with more productive uses for the spectrum to take over.
If this is done, the amount of licensed spectrum available for connectivity services will grow substantially.
What is most amazing is that many of the misleading myths that shackle the telecom industry have been recurring in history.
It appears that often it takes hard experience for service providers to discover the right solutions.
Fortunately that can happen.
As an example, it does appear that as a result of its leadership in broadband as well as cellular usage, South Korea has unlearned some of these myths.
For example, the myths that content is king and that killer apps are required no longer dominate:
The killer application of the Internet is speed," said Lee Yong Kyung, the chief
executive of the KT Corporation, formerly known as Korea Telecom, which controls nearly half of the country's broadband market.
The money is in the pipes."
On the other hand, Korea still appears to be in thrall to the myth of streaming real-time multimedia.
Carriers can develop innovative new services
There is no serious evidence to support this myth.
In spite of many attempts, the established service providers and their suppliers have an abysmal record in innovation in user services.
The real killer apps such as email, the Web, browsers, search engines, IM, and Napster, have all come from users.
Is there any reason to expect the future to be any different?
If anything, we should expect an even greater fraction of innovations to come from users at the edges of the network.
We are experiencing several types of convergence, of computing and communications, of content and connectivity, and so on.
Hence the variety of services will be growing, and the ranks of potential creators of those services will also be growing.
It will require ever more knowledge of what users need to take advantage of the growing opportunities, and we can't expect centralized organizations to be able to do it.
Content is king
One of the oldest, most wildly held, and most damaging myths is that content is king.
Content has never been as large or as important as connectivity, person-to-person communication.
The myth of content as king has repeatedly led telecoms to waste huge amounts
of money trying to get into the content business.
Yet providing pipes for connectivity has always brought much more revenue than content distribution.
The myth of content as king is also behind much of the movement to enact harmfully restrictive copyright laws.
Voice is irrelevant
Voice is still what provides well over 70% of telecom service revenues.
In particular, the real telecom success story of the 1990s, whether measured in terms of revenue growth or number of subscribers, was in wireless voice, not on the Internet .
The greatest neglected opportunity, though, is in the wireless voice quality area.
The current quality of cellular voice is basically abysmal, just barely tolerable.
There are some signs that the wireless industry is beginning to realize that voice will be the main application of 3G.
But this recognition is late and slow.
The importance of voice leads to the relative unattractiveness of videotelephony.
But whatever the reasons, videotelephony is not a killer app, and we should expect slow growth in it.
Videoconferencing is likely to be accepted more widely, but is not likely to generate much traffic.
Videoconferencing leads to one of the minor and relatively innocuous myths of telecom.
While telecommuting and videoconferencing are likely to grow, that will not reduce road congestion.
There is this strangely persistent myth that telecommunications and transportation are substitutes for each other.
They are not, and are in fact positively correlated.
Hence we should expect growth of travel at the same time as telecom usage is booming.
Therefore, as had been predicted a long time ago by Negroponte, Gilder, and others, it makes much more sense to deliver content (which is, after all, prepared by experts for wide consumption) as files for local storage, replay, and transfer.
(Hardly any content in this definition requires the synchronicity of voice or videotelephony.)
The future of multimedia traffic is not just in file transfers, but also in faster-than-real-time file transfers. This seems to be almost completely missed by the telecom industry.
So the phenomenon of faster-than-real-time transmission has already become dominant, but the industry is not aware of it, and certainly does not understand it.
What are the advantages of faster-than-real-time transmission of multimedia?
There are a variety of them.
Among others, such transmission makes QoS unnecessary, it caters to human impatience, it allows natural behavior, such as quick download followed by a quick transfer to a portable device to take on a trip, and it allows for a natural progression, starting with slower-than-real-time when you don't have the bandwidth, and then moving up to faster-than-real-time. But the industry is still concentrating on developing technologies for streaming real-time delivery.
An American expert on streaming multimedia technology who spent the summer of 2003 in South Korea, working with researchers there, reports that even the Koreans see no reason for ever going much beyond 50 Mbps to the home.
After all, that would provide for several HDTV channels, and all the Web surfing and email anyone could want.
But with faster-than-real-time file transfers, it is easy to envisage demand arising for bigger pipes.
Information technology still has a long way to do in terms of diffusing through society, and that will continue generating additional traffic.
This is not to argue that there won't be any new applications that will be called killer apps," or that one should not look for them, but the general conclusion is that there is no need to rely on their discovery.
The Internet is often cited for erasing the gaps created by physical distance.
But that is a misleading notion.
While the Internet traffic so far has been rather independent of distance, that is likely to change substantially, to fall into the pattern of other communication services, which have been and continue to be primarily local .
One sign of that is in reports from Korea that less than 5% of their Internet traffic goes outside that country.
With convergence of consumer electronics, business information technology, telecommunications, and content, the action will be at the edges, in homes and businesses, melding all these elements together.
It will be local communication that will need to be provided in profusion, in order to allow for easy implementations of new services.
The telecom industry does not appreciate the need to encourage usage.
Technology is advancing, so bandwidth is growing, and the service providers that will win will be the ones who teach their customers how to use the increasing capacity of their links.
And nothing helps whet the appetite for bandwidth as much as flat rates and not having to worry about priorities and the like.
Expanding the spectrum that is available for connectivity, as opposed to broadcast, would not only respond to the urgent need for local mobility in communications, but would indirectly aid the whole sector by demonstrating what it is that is truly needed.
Somebody likes it "Hot", everybody likes it "Flat"
The historic trend in telecommunications has been of revenues growing faster than the economy as a whole, at least over long periods of time, and this trend is likely to resume as we continue the evolution towards an economy based on information.
Content (defined here as material prepared by professionals for consumption by large audiences, in particular movies, recorded music, and professional sports team play) is a large and prosperous business.
However, it has never been as large or as important as connectivity, person-to-person communication.
Once a service becomes inexpensive enough, social uses begin to play a major role.
In fact, the general disdain for what is often called gossip has repeatedly misled decision makers.
Not only is there a lot of money in carrying gossip, but gossip plays a crucial role in all human interactions.
The myth of content as king has repeatedly led telecom to waste huge amounts of money trying to get into the content business.
Yet providing pipes for connectivity has always brought much more revenue than content distribution.
Voice is still what provides well over 70% of telecom service revenues.
In particular, the real telecom success story of the 1990s, whether measured in terms of revenue growth or number of subscribers, was in wireless voice, not on the Internet.
In their infatuation with data and especially with content, carriers appear to have given up on doing anything innovative with voice.
The new killer app. will be VoIP and we will have broadband pipes, whether wired or wireless, and voice will be just another service delivered over them at low or even zero cost.
This will be similar to what has happened with email, which has been and continues to be the killer app of the Internet.
But note that the importance of email is understood by ISPs, and it continues to get enhanced.
Not so with voice.
And yet there is much more that can be done with voice.
This is very strange, because voice is an extremely important human method of communication.
We all know that "one picture is worth a thousand words." But that is not quite right.
Pictures, photos, and video are all very important, but usually not by themselves.
What does seem to be true is that:
One picture is worth a thousand words, provided one uses another thousand words to justify the picture.
With convergence of consumer electronics, business information technology, telecommunications, and content, the action will be at the edges, in homes and businesses, melding all these elements together.
It will be local communication that will need to be provided in profusion, in order to allow for easy implementations of new services.
The telecom industry does not appreciate the need to encourage usage.
Technology is advancing, so bandwidth is growing, and the service providers that will win will be the ones who teach their customers how to use the increasing capacity of their links.
And nothing helps whet the appetite for bandwidth as much as flat rates and not having to worry about priorities and the like.
Content (defined here as material prepared by professionals for consumption by large audiences, in particular movies, recorded music, and professional sports team play) is a large and prosperous business.
However, it has never been as large or as important as connectivity, person-to-person communication.
Once a service becomes inexpensive enough, social uses begin to play a major role.
In fact, the general disdain for what is often called gossip has repeatedly misled decision makers.
Not only is there a lot of money in carrying gossip, but gossip plays a crucial role in all human interactions.
The myth of content as king has repeatedly led telecom to waste huge amounts of money trying to get into the content business.
Yet providing pipes for connectivity has always brought much more revenue than content distribution.
Voice is still what provides well over 70% of telecom service revenues.
In particular, the real telecom success story of the 1990s, whether measured in terms of revenue growth or number of subscribers, was in wireless voice, not on the Internet.
In their infatuation with data and especially with content, carriers appear to have given up on doing anything innovative with voice.
The new killer app. will be VoIP and we will have broadband pipes, whether wired or wireless, and voice will be just another service delivered over them at low or even zero cost.
This will be similar to what has happened with email, which has been and continues to be the killer app of the Internet.
But note that the importance of email is understood by ISPs, and it continues to get enhanced.
Not so with voice.
And yet there is much more that can be done with voice.
This is very strange, because voice is an extremely important human method of communication.
We all know that "one picture is worth a thousand words." But that is not quite right.
Pictures, photos, and video are all very important, but usually not by themselves.
What does seem to be true is that:
One picture is worth a thousand words, provided one uses another thousand words to justify the picture.
With convergence of consumer electronics, business information technology, telecommunications, and content, the action will be at the edges, in homes and businesses, melding all these elements together.
It will be local communication that will need to be provided in profusion, in order to allow for easy implementations of new services.
The telecom industry does not appreciate the need to encourage usage.
Technology is advancing, so bandwidth is growing, and the service providers that will win will be the ones who teach their customers how to use the increasing capacity of their links.
And nothing helps whet the appetite for bandwidth as much as flat rates and not having to worry about priorities and the like.
Sunday, October 10, 2004
The Art of being Normal
Maybe I am a naïve person. Maybe I even like to be and to consider myself as a naïve person.
Sometimes I am so fed up with the so called intelligent and smart people that I do not want to belong to that category.
If being smart means to say and do certain things, let me say:
"I am happy to be dumb".
Which in principle is not an easy task.
First you have to be one and second you have to admit to be one.
It is almost like being normal. Nowadays nobody wants to be normal.
It is very, very easy to hear: I am a special kind of this and a special kind of that.
I am just a special kind of a normal human being.
And as a special kind of normal I want to be able to say and do that special kind of normal things that the normal people do.
Like having a blog where I talk in a normal way about normal things.
What is more normal than Communication?
We are born alone and we die alone, but we like to live together with somebody, possibly saying something once in a while.
So, being communication the most normal and usual thing that normal and special kind of normal people do, in my opinion investing in it can be one of the most profitable investments one could do.
But having profits, or what the smart people call having a high ROI one has to meet the expectations of many.
The number in my (normal) opinion makes the business.
To reach the high number besides meeting the expectations of many you must also meet them with the lowest price.
That doesn't necessarily mean too cheap or even free, that just means giving a lot (services that work)at the lowest.
Of course talking face to face meets 100% this goal.
But sometimes being face to face can be very expensive too.
So what about a nice good conversation with crystal clear voice at a very low price even at cost zero?
That in principle is what is behind all the talking about VoIP.
Who cares to know how it works?
It just matters to know it works and how making it possible.
What is a wireless VoIP phone?
A wonderful way to talk for free, all the rest is just technology...
Patrizia from a World on IP
Sometimes I am so fed up with the so called intelligent and smart people that I do not want to belong to that category.
If being smart means to say and do certain things, let me say:
"I am happy to be dumb".
Which in principle is not an easy task.
First you have to be one and second you have to admit to be one.
It is almost like being normal. Nowadays nobody wants to be normal.
It is very, very easy to hear: I am a special kind of this and a special kind of that.
I am just a special kind of a normal human being.
And as a special kind of normal I want to be able to say and do that special kind of normal things that the normal people do.
Like having a blog where I talk in a normal way about normal things.
What is more normal than Communication?
We are born alone and we die alone, but we like to live together with somebody, possibly saying something once in a while.
So, being communication the most normal and usual thing that normal and special kind of normal people do, in my opinion investing in it can be one of the most profitable investments one could do.
But having profits, or what the smart people call having a high ROI one has to meet the expectations of many.
The number in my (normal) opinion makes the business.
To reach the high number besides meeting the expectations of many you must also meet them with the lowest price.
That doesn't necessarily mean too cheap or even free, that just means giving a lot (services that work)at the lowest.
Of course talking face to face meets 100% this goal.
But sometimes being face to face can be very expensive too.
So what about a nice good conversation with crystal clear voice at a very low price even at cost zero?
That in principle is what is behind all the talking about VoIP.
Who cares to know how it works?
It just matters to know it works and how making it possible.
What is a wireless VoIP phone?
A wonderful way to talk for free, all the rest is just technology...
Patrizia from a World on IP
Tuesday, September 28, 2004
Here we think again...
Till a little time ago I thought I had a clear vision about the War in Iraq and the America Presidential election.
But, of course, I am Italian, and besides having a trivial view of life I also have a poor view of politics and economy.
I always thought that, on the contrary of what humans usually react, when somebody hits you, something must be wrong and before hitting back, you'd better find out what that is.
Even Aesop was saying that in his story of the fight between sun and wind.
At the end the sun was the winner because it used its intelligence instead of its power.
But certainly that was many years ago, and at the end of the day: what the hell do poets think of understanding life and people?
Listen to the American President, he can give you the best lessons about it, how to begin a war, how to win it and how to go on fighting even when the war is finished.
In principle it is exactly what they did before.
But that is nothing compared to his personal view of politics and political strategic alliances.
Now it comes out that his competitor in the Presidential elections has secret agreements with nothing less than Al Quaeda. Who votes for him is certainly voting for terrorism.
And I always thought exactly the opposite!
I am definitely sure that from now on every patriotic American will know who will win the elections.
The bad part of it is that, after a little While, they will soon realize who lost them.
Patrizia from a World on IP
patrizia@worldonip.com
But, of course, I am Italian, and besides having a trivial view of life I also have a poor view of politics and economy.
I always thought that, on the contrary of what humans usually react, when somebody hits you, something must be wrong and before hitting back, you'd better find out what that is.
Even Aesop was saying that in his story of the fight between sun and wind.
At the end the sun was the winner because it used its intelligence instead of its power.
But certainly that was many years ago, and at the end of the day: what the hell do poets think of understanding life and people?
Listen to the American President, he can give you the best lessons about it, how to begin a war, how to win it and how to go on fighting even when the war is finished.
In principle it is exactly what they did before.
But that is nothing compared to his personal view of politics and political strategic alliances.
Now it comes out that his competitor in the Presidential elections has secret agreements with nothing less than Al Quaeda. Who votes for him is certainly voting for terrorism.
And I always thought exactly the opposite!
I am definitely sure that from now on every patriotic American will know who will win the elections.
The bad part of it is that, after a little While, they will soon realize who lost them.
Patrizia from a World on IP
patrizia@worldonip.com
Sunday, September 26, 2004
Here we Blog again...
Here we Blog again...
The Americans are great because they went to the moon, but the Italians were greater because they didn't even think of going there.
And when they struggled if it was correct saying "The Eagle has landed" or "wouldn't it have been better to say has mooned...", the Italians were in no stress because a dish of "Spaghetti alla carbonara" and a dish of "Pizza" have more or less the same calories, and what decides is just your own personal taste.
What a trivial way of seeing life! Yes you are definitely right, we Italians are not able to think great.
That is probably why our economy is going so bad.
We never realized how important is to throw bombs somewhere.
It is true, they could eventually produce a slight damage (but being far away from home, who cares?).
But just think of all the good they produce.
They create new jobs, they give a boost to your economy, and more than everything, they produce further richness where least needed.
It is also true you could eventually create new jobs producing something else, but what about all the oil wasted just to transport them, the pollution of those cute small war planes, the huge amount of taxes the Americans have to pay just in order to fill gaps in the state balance?
Well, I must say we trivial Italians are far away from that.
Of course we also got a few who share the political view of the American President, for example our leader.
But sometimes he has to face a strong opposition by the ones who understand nothing about politics and nothing about economy.
For example: why the people who have 750 millions dollars in their bank account are free to talk about the poor and the people who do not even have a bank account are not allowed to talk about the rich?
The obvious and well accepted explanation is that they do not know the right words and the right way.
If you are an ignorant, you'd better shut up.
Once people had to "fill holes", now I wake up every morning and think "I have to fill my Blog".
What the hell will I write?
And most important: "Who the hell will read me?"
May be I should do a little bit of spamming and send a few catching phrases and stop in the right moment with the word Continue, so that when one clicks on it, he is directed to my blog.
This is the fate of the ones who write for the precious goal of being read.
There are some lucky people out there who write because somebody is paying them.
And they do not even have to care what they write.
They just have to say the few, right, blah, blah that the person who pays them wants them to write.
And those people are usually called Journalists or writers or even poets, even though we are more inclined to see a poet as a person who writes just what he feels, and when he feels the right feelings.
Well sometimes the world is very unfair, but what can we do?
We could also decide not to write anymore, but then, who would fill our Blogs?
How could we compete in stupidity?
How could we out-dumb each other?
Who in the end would be the best in talking a lot saying nothing?
Patrizia from a World on IP
patrizia@worldonip.com
The Americans are great because they went to the moon, but the Italians were greater because they didn't even think of going there.
And when they struggled if it was correct saying "The Eagle has landed" or "wouldn't it have been better to say has mooned...", the Italians were in no stress because a dish of "Spaghetti alla carbonara" and a dish of "Pizza" have more or less the same calories, and what decides is just your own personal taste.
What a trivial way of seeing life! Yes you are definitely right, we Italians are not able to think great.
That is probably why our economy is going so bad.
We never realized how important is to throw bombs somewhere.
It is true, they could eventually produce a slight damage (but being far away from home, who cares?).
But just think of all the good they produce.
They create new jobs, they give a boost to your economy, and more than everything, they produce further richness where least needed.
It is also true you could eventually create new jobs producing something else, but what about all the oil wasted just to transport them, the pollution of those cute small war planes, the huge amount of taxes the Americans have to pay just in order to fill gaps in the state balance?
Well, I must say we trivial Italians are far away from that.
Of course we also got a few who share the political view of the American President, for example our leader.
But sometimes he has to face a strong opposition by the ones who understand nothing about politics and nothing about economy.
For example: why the people who have 750 millions dollars in their bank account are free to talk about the poor and the people who do not even have a bank account are not allowed to talk about the rich?
The obvious and well accepted explanation is that they do not know the right words and the right way.
If you are an ignorant, you'd better shut up.
Once people had to "fill holes", now I wake up every morning and think "I have to fill my Blog".
What the hell will I write?
And most important: "Who the hell will read me?"
May be I should do a little bit of spamming and send a few catching phrases and stop in the right moment with the word Continue, so that when one clicks on it, he is directed to my blog.
This is the fate of the ones who write for the precious goal of being read.
There are some lucky people out there who write because somebody is paying them.
And they do not even have to care what they write.
They just have to say the few, right, blah, blah that the person who pays them wants them to write.
And those people are usually called Journalists or writers or even poets, even though we are more inclined to see a poet as a person who writes just what he feels, and when he feels the right feelings.
Well sometimes the world is very unfair, but what can we do?
We could also decide not to write anymore, but then, who would fill our Blogs?
How could we compete in stupidity?
How could we out-dumb each other?
Who in the end would be the best in talking a lot saying nothing?
Patrizia from a World on IP
patrizia@worldonip.com
Answering to a "Hackers' Manifesto"
"Ours is a world that ventures blindly into the new with its fingers crossed."
That reminds me something.
When Mussolini (at that time) came to pay a visit to Cuneo, the town where I was born (luckily many years after that), they coined a special medal.
On one side they wrote: " The Dux lead us" and on the other side " The Madonna protect us".
"All classes fear this relentless abstraction of the world, on which their fortunes yet depend. All classes but one: the hacker class."
You forget to mention the class of the people who live with a daily empty belly, but then, they have something else to care about, more important than the relentless abstraction of the world.
"We are the hackers of abstraction. We produce new concepts, new perceptions, new sensations, hacked out of raw data. Whatever code we hack, be it programming language, poetic language, math or music, curves or colorings, we are the abstracters of new worlds. Whether we come to represent ourselves as researchers or authors, artists or biologists, chemists or musicians, philosophers or programmers, each of these subjectivities is but a fragment of a class still becoming, bit by bit, aware of itself as such."
I like it, "hackers of abstraction" sounds much better than "file sharing or "Cyber piracy" or even worst, the old, plain usual way, the word used since centuries "plagiarism".
But at the end of the day, the Hackers of abstraction do nothing else than copying music or movies or whatever and sharing it with somebody else.
And that is the point.
If you want to fight, you first define what you have to fight against, then fire your weapons and deal with the consequences.
No use to hide yourself behind euphemisms, neologisms or whatever other rhetoric you can choose.
Say what you want to do and why and why you think it right and may be how you would change the actual situation and law and why.
Otherwise we go on talking and saying nothing.
"A hacker manifesto: Not the only manifesto, as it is in the nature of the hacker to differ from others, to differ even from oneself, over time. To hack is to differ."
I would agree if the Hacker was a dog, or a bird, or a fish.
But being the Hacker a human, he is condemned to be always a human after all. Oscar Wilde said "It is a humiliating confession, but behind each one of us there is one common thing that goes under the name of : Human Nature."
"and where in that information new possibilities for the world produced, there are hackers hacking the new out of the old. Hackers create these new worlds, yet we do not possess them.
That which we create is mortgaged to others, and to the interests of others, to states and corporations who monopolies the means for making worlds we alone discover. We do not own what we produce -- it owns us."
I like that "It owns us" it sounds great. A pity it doesn't mean anything.
If I write an essay about something, I hardly can see how it can own me.
May be in certain cases it can haunt the creator, and that is how most of the so called "stupid audience" like to see a poet or a writer or a painter, as somebody who is haunted by his creations.
Rarely is this way.
"We must live with our compromises.(Some refuse to compromise.) "
Holy words!
"Hackers are not joiners. We're not often willing to submerge our singularity in any collective. What the times call for is a collective hack that realizes a class interest based on an alignment of differences rather than a coercive unity."
I have another opinion on what the times call.
May be they just call for a fair law about copyrights, a law that would allow who produces something of interest for the collectivity to be paid and the people to enjoy it without having to pay too much and for too long. As simple as that.
"The slogan of the hacker class is not the workers of the world united, but the workings of the world untied."
At least we agree on that....
Patrizia from a World on IP
http://www.worldonip.com
That reminds me something.
When Mussolini (at that time) came to pay a visit to Cuneo, the town where I was born (luckily many years after that), they coined a special medal.
On one side they wrote: " The Dux lead us" and on the other side " The Madonna protect us".
"All classes fear this relentless abstraction of the world, on which their fortunes yet depend. All classes but one: the hacker class."
You forget to mention the class of the people who live with a daily empty belly, but then, they have something else to care about, more important than the relentless abstraction of the world.
"We are the hackers of abstraction. We produce new concepts, new perceptions, new sensations, hacked out of raw data. Whatever code we hack, be it programming language, poetic language, math or music, curves or colorings, we are the abstracters of new worlds. Whether we come to represent ourselves as researchers or authors, artists or biologists, chemists or musicians, philosophers or programmers, each of these subjectivities is but a fragment of a class still becoming, bit by bit, aware of itself as such."
I like it, "hackers of abstraction" sounds much better than "file sharing or "Cyber piracy" or even worst, the old, plain usual way, the word used since centuries "plagiarism".
But at the end of the day, the Hackers of abstraction do nothing else than copying music or movies or whatever and sharing it with somebody else.
And that is the point.
If you want to fight, you first define what you have to fight against, then fire your weapons and deal with the consequences.
No use to hide yourself behind euphemisms, neologisms or whatever other rhetoric you can choose.
Say what you want to do and why and why you think it right and may be how you would change the actual situation and law and why.
Otherwise we go on talking and saying nothing.
"A hacker manifesto: Not the only manifesto, as it is in the nature of the hacker to differ from others, to differ even from oneself, over time. To hack is to differ."
I would agree if the Hacker was a dog, or a bird, or a fish.
But being the Hacker a human, he is condemned to be always a human after all. Oscar Wilde said "It is a humiliating confession, but behind each one of us there is one common thing that goes under the name of : Human Nature."
"and where in that information new possibilities for the world produced, there are hackers hacking the new out of the old. Hackers create these new worlds, yet we do not possess them.
That which we create is mortgaged to others, and to the interests of others, to states and corporations who monopolies the means for making worlds we alone discover. We do not own what we produce -- it owns us."
I like that "It owns us" it sounds great. A pity it doesn't mean anything.
If I write an essay about something, I hardly can see how it can own me.
May be in certain cases it can haunt the creator, and that is how most of the so called "stupid audience" like to see a poet or a writer or a painter, as somebody who is haunted by his creations.
Rarely is this way.
"We must live with our compromises.(Some refuse to compromise.) "
Holy words!
"Hackers are not joiners. We're not often willing to submerge our singularity in any collective. What the times call for is a collective hack that realizes a class interest based on an alignment of differences rather than a coercive unity."
I have another opinion on what the times call.
May be they just call for a fair law about copyrights, a law that would allow who produces something of interest for the collectivity to be paid and the people to enjoy it without having to pay too much and for too long. As simple as that.
"The slogan of the hacker class is not the workers of the world united, but the workings of the world untied."
At least we agree on that....
Patrizia from a World on IP
http://www.worldonip.com
Friday, September 24, 2004
Un urlo al mondo
Se scrivere e' un dono, non scrivere talvolta puo' essere un dono ancora piu' grande, ma tacere puo' essere una grande sofferenza, almeno per quanto mi riguarda, e nel mio caso non per glorificare me stessa, ma per poter urlare al mondo che non condivido il modo in cui gira.
Non condivido la politica di chi lo dirige e soprattutto non condivido la stupidita' di chi e' solo capace a lamentarsi ma non fa assolutamente nulla per cambiare nulla.
Forse e' la rassegnazione della gente che piu' mi adira.
Io definisco me stess Mrs Complaining numero 1, ma finora non ho raggiunto grandi obiettivi.
Voler cambiare il mondo e' forse un obiettivo troppo grande per le mie forze, ma almeno ci provo.
In questo quadro quando nel 1995 ho avuto il primo approccio con l'Internet ne sono stata entusiasta, perche' ho capito subito la grande potenzialita' e il potere rivoluzionario di un tale mezzo.
Si, io paragono l'impatto di Internet alla Rivoluzione Francese.
In fondo l'eredita' della Rivoluzione francese non e' stata nei nuovi ideali che ha contribuito a diffondere.
Il grande cambiamento e' stato a livello sociale.
Al posto del re e di pochi nobili sono arrivati al potere I medio alto borghesi che hanno contribuito a creare un'economia in cui la ricchezza era piu' distribuita.
E questo e' esattamente quello che l'internet rendera' possible.
La morte di Dinosauri come le telecoms e la nascita di una classe di piccoli, intelligenti inprenditori.
Le infrastrutture della comunicazione non saranno piu' appannaggio di pochi, perche' il loro prezzo e' sceso a tal punto da rendere possible la frammentarizzazione in migliaia di "connectivity points".
Io arrivo persino al punto di parlare di "customers' owned infrastructures", ma questa al momento puo' sembrare fantascienza (ma avverra' prima che uno se lo aspetti, almeno in paesi come la Cina)
Io vedo l'Europa avviarsi verso non solo il declino economico ma anche verso il conseguente decline tecnologico.
E' il prezzo che pagano le nazioni in cui una unita' centrale agisce non a favore dei propri cittadini, a favore dell'economia, ma a favore di pochi gruppi monopolistici che detengono e vogliono continuare a detenere il mercato. In poche parole si sacrifica il progresso perche' questo e' contro l'interesse di pochi.
In America si spinge a consumare piu' petrolio, anche se e' risaputo che un giorno non molto lontano non ci saranno piu' riserve, e solo perche' ci sono grossi gruppi che hanno interesse a vendere sempre di piu'
In Cina si incentive a risparmiare il petrolio, perche l'economia dipende dalla sua disponibilita'.
Chi dei due lei pensa che avra' un futuro?
In Italia l'unica frequenza libera per il Wireless e' 26 GHz, quando tutte le nazioni piu' progredite hanno firmato un accordo che lasciava all'uso dei propri cittadini la frequenza libera di 2.4GHz.
( Anche l'Italia ha firmato, ma ora si schiera dietro l'asserzione"per uso privato", come se usare l'Internet fosse per uso pubblico!)
Questo significa che in Inghilterra ad esempio ci sono tantissimi piccolo ISP che hanno una certa indipendenza dal Monopolio grazie al fatto di possedere (molto poco costosi) sistemi Wireless.
In commercio per ora non c'e' nessun sistema Wireless che funzioni con la frequenza di 26 GHz.
Tutto questo io vorrei poterlo urlare, a voce cosi' alta da poter raggiungere le orecchie di quelli che si lamentano e non fanno nulla.
Gli Ignavi del 21mo secolo.
Patrizia da un World on IP
patrizia@worldonip.com
Non condivido la politica di chi lo dirige e soprattutto non condivido la stupidita' di chi e' solo capace a lamentarsi ma non fa assolutamente nulla per cambiare nulla.
Forse e' la rassegnazione della gente che piu' mi adira.
Io definisco me stess Mrs Complaining numero 1, ma finora non ho raggiunto grandi obiettivi.
Voler cambiare il mondo e' forse un obiettivo troppo grande per le mie forze, ma almeno ci provo.
In questo quadro quando nel 1995 ho avuto il primo approccio con l'Internet ne sono stata entusiasta, perche' ho capito subito la grande potenzialita' e il potere rivoluzionario di un tale mezzo.
Si, io paragono l'impatto di Internet alla Rivoluzione Francese.
In fondo l'eredita' della Rivoluzione francese non e' stata nei nuovi ideali che ha contribuito a diffondere.
Il grande cambiamento e' stato a livello sociale.
Al posto del re e di pochi nobili sono arrivati al potere I medio alto borghesi che hanno contribuito a creare un'economia in cui la ricchezza era piu' distribuita.
E questo e' esattamente quello che l'internet rendera' possible.
La morte di Dinosauri come le telecoms e la nascita di una classe di piccoli, intelligenti inprenditori.
Le infrastrutture della comunicazione non saranno piu' appannaggio di pochi, perche' il loro prezzo e' sceso a tal punto da rendere possible la frammentarizzazione in migliaia di "connectivity points".
Io arrivo persino al punto di parlare di "customers' owned infrastructures", ma questa al momento puo' sembrare fantascienza (ma avverra' prima che uno se lo aspetti, almeno in paesi come la Cina)
Io vedo l'Europa avviarsi verso non solo il declino economico ma anche verso il conseguente decline tecnologico.
E' il prezzo che pagano le nazioni in cui una unita' centrale agisce non a favore dei propri cittadini, a favore dell'economia, ma a favore di pochi gruppi monopolistici che detengono e vogliono continuare a detenere il mercato. In poche parole si sacrifica il progresso perche' questo e' contro l'interesse di pochi.
In America si spinge a consumare piu' petrolio, anche se e' risaputo che un giorno non molto lontano non ci saranno piu' riserve, e solo perche' ci sono grossi gruppi che hanno interesse a vendere sempre di piu'
In Cina si incentive a risparmiare il petrolio, perche l'economia dipende dalla sua disponibilita'.
Chi dei due lei pensa che avra' un futuro?
In Italia l'unica frequenza libera per il Wireless e' 26 GHz, quando tutte le nazioni piu' progredite hanno firmato un accordo che lasciava all'uso dei propri cittadini la frequenza libera di 2.4GHz.
( Anche l'Italia ha firmato, ma ora si schiera dietro l'asserzione"per uso privato", come se usare l'Internet fosse per uso pubblico!)
Questo significa che in Inghilterra ad esempio ci sono tantissimi piccolo ISP che hanno una certa indipendenza dal Monopolio grazie al fatto di possedere (molto poco costosi) sistemi Wireless.
In commercio per ora non c'e' nessun sistema Wireless che funzioni con la frequenza di 26 GHz.
Tutto questo io vorrei poterlo urlare, a voce cosi' alta da poter raggiungere le orecchie di quelli che si lamentano e non fanno nulla.
Gli Ignavi del 21mo secolo.
Patrizia da un World on IP
patrizia@worldonip.com
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