It's your bed, ...

A quick update on the EU Roaming regulation proposals by Vivienne Reding.
You would think, from all the irate posturing of the telcos, that they have been hard done by. I don't think many of them actually read the speech as they have been coming out with arguments like 'all that routing of calls and maintaining agreements costs money'. Yes, we know; now run along and read the speech...
Here's the telling line, in case you can't find it yourselves:

'The new Regulation will not prescribe a specific “ideal” price for international roaming, but would require that international roaming charges are not higher than national roaming charges.'

In other words, she's not saying it should be the same price as it is to call on your network, but that it should be the same as it is to call on someone elses network in your own country. All routing and agreement factors apply here, so those arguments won't fly.
The only difference is the trunking between operators, the POIs will be often be further away and may involve transit operators.
I even read one operator bemoaning the cost of the systems to handle TAP settlement! Well, if you go and define a highly complicated standard for sending call records back and forward, then don't expect developers to come up with systems for peanuts. It's your bed, lie in it!

A word of advice for the mobile operators; do the right thing and give the customer a fair deal, you may be surprised at the outcome! With the right services, I would expect the revenue to increase, not decrease. When I'm at home, I could care less about news updates on my handset, when abroad, I would definitely feel more comfortable with a live link back to my home base (though this is more than offset by the current uncomfortable feeling that I am being soundly pillaged by my operator for the priviledge!)

Transparency in pricing is good, but only when the price is not prohibitive. I know how much it is to fly BA business class, but I don't do it unless someone else is paying!

Euroaming ripoff...

GSM operators time is nearly up on roaming charges. At least I hope it is. The EU is currently considering what to do about sky high roaming charges, and it's about time!
It is a sad reflection of what happens when there is no regulation to force fair trade and competition onto the mobile operators.
In the past GSM operators had roaming agreements that were based on a 'retail-plus' model where the Home Operator would charge the Visiting Operator a retail tariff plus a 10-25% surcharge, which was then marked up by the Visiting Operator by another 10-25% before appearing on your bill.
The spirit of this agreement was supposed to be the 'standard' retail charge, however it never came down when the operators reduced their tariffs for their own customers. If the spirit of the agreements had been honoured then we would all be paying no more than around 20p/minute, allowing for a 50% surcharge on the current standard rate (some would argue that typical per minute charges are lower than that).
With the advent of TAP3, operators were free to negotiate individual roaming agreements not based on 'retail-plus', however, rather than this reducing rates to the level they could easily support, rates fell only marginally, operators preferring to emphasise the improvements in price transparency instead.
'Hey, instead of surprising you with a bill for random amounts between 50p and 1.00 per minute, we can now guarantee you that you will be ripped off at the same level of 50p, no matter which country (in the small list provided) you travel to!'

I find it surprising that it has taken so long for anything to be done about this, as it has been on the radar for at least 5 years! They have certainly given the operators time to get their house in order.

On the other hand, the market will change in the next couple of years and will force major changes on the operators. WiFi in mobile phones, plus the VoIP software that is able to use it, will mean that no-one will need to pay the extortionate roaming charges unless they really want to.

Personally I always use Skype from the hotel room when I am abroad, and I know this is standard practice for a lot of small companies. When Skype (or other VoIP software) runs on my Nokia N80 (that I don't have yet!), I will be signed up to FON and making calls on the alternative network. Vodafone and others need to undergo as radical a transformation as BT, but perhaps it's too late, they should have started 5 years ago...

TescoMax

Or Great Couples (part V) Tesco and WiMax.

I made a comment over on GigaOm about rollout of WiMax networks. There was another comment and general consensus that building a network would be expensive. I quoted Swisscom on the fact that their subscribers tend not to move around a lot and make all their calls from 3 cells (around 70%).
What's the relevance, they cried! Well, I'll tell you; we all tend to have fairly well-defined movement patterns and one of the key things we all do (from a movement perspective) is go shopping.
I checked out some statistics and here's what I found:
- About 77% of Tesco's customers travel less than 10 minutes (drive time) to their store (64% for rural areas - N.B. its 89 and 81% at 15 minutes!)
- Tesco has around 700 stores in the UK (Extra, Tesco & Tesco Metro)

Doing the maths on this that means that at an average speed of 60km/h (fast!) then 77% of Tesco's customers live within a 10km radius of their stores. WiMax conservative estimates put range at around 8km in NLOS conditions, which means that even on conservative cell size, it is close to covering those customers in a single cell. I'll make no claims about capacity, or how easy it would be to stick up a transmitter in every Tesco store, but it seems to me you could build a network covering a fairly large proportion of the UK population, not randomly, but a consumer segment, with a fairly limited investment.

How the supermarket chains could use such a service (for it applies equally to other chains) I will leave to your imagination (or ask me and I'll give you my opinion!).

I wonder what area the old telephone exchanges typically covered? (n.b. Pipex was up 16% on 15th March, though fell back yesterday)

Torrent of Abuse...

The BBC recently ran an excellent apology for a Newsnight piece that equated encryption of BitTorrent and other torrent programs as aiding terrorists and criminals.
I didn't see the original program, but the piece by Adam Livingstone put the issue in very plain language...
If 30% of internet traffic is the various torrent traffic, and it is all encrypted, then what hope to the authorities have of monitoring it and decrypting it. Indeed.
The plain fact is that monitoring of internet 'conversation' or transactions, is just not a practical proposition any more.
Just look at the nature programs showing the majestic herds of Wildebeeste sweeping across the plains of Africa. Would you be able to track the movements and behaviour of Joe W. Wildebeeste? No, I didn't think so.
Phone tapping was a luxury that had it's technological moment and it has now gone, law enforcement needs to find other ways to determine wrongdoing.

The Adam Livingstone article raised another interesting (if somewhat obvious to techies) point, which was that encrypted traffic is not service differentiated, i.e. as an ISP you can't tell what my bits are related to, so you can't filter out applications that you don't want me to use.
Just like the Power company can't tell whether I am using my electricity to power my toaster or my kettle, and therefore just supplies me with electricity! It's a simple utility.

The BBC seemed to think that this is a problem, but it's only relevant if you believe that the authorities have a right to monitor what you are doing (especially via the automated systems that are currently being implemented).
Encryption, coupled with the use of ports that are commonly in use and P2P or federated server systems, ensures that all services are treated equally, the ISP or telco can't start to discriminate in favour of some services. Of course, they could de-prioritise all unknown encrypted traffic, but I somehow doubt whether that would be acceptable to the customer.
There are things the telco could do to regain control, but in my view, the internet has developed past the point where they are practical. If the telcos had provided a decent partnership package (I don't want to say platform!) back in 1999 or 2000, then it might have been successful, but the bio-diversity of the internet is now beyond control of one group.

It's going to take some kind of apocalyptic event to put the internet back in the bottle, net neutrality or not.
Do Bell South, AT&T and SBC look like Three of the Four Riders to you?

Evil Blogger?

I've been using Writely for a while to publish blog posts, however, last time I tried to post I got a message saying 'error: (405)method not allowed'.
I am going to presume that this is to prevent the thousands of 'Splogs' that have been created, now that everyone knows about how effective blogs are as advertising (that statement needs to be severely qualified, but I'm going to leave it).

Russel Beattie posted something about a company called EdgeIO. This effectively allows people to post classified ads anywhere and have them indexed in one place (or many, many places).
The power of this is phenomenal, and coupled with a bit of structure(d blogging) could make a blog into a fairly effective 'shop'.

The only trouble with all of this is the size of it all. The internet is much bigger than it used to be and most people have a hard time dealing with the quantity of information out there. Community, and the self-[regulation/selection/validation] of content is going to get bigger, and silos are going to form. Not controlled by the companies, but by the users themselves. Of course, the smarter companies realise that their customers own and control them, and not vice versa.

Yellowish Hue?!

The NTP vs RIM affair has left me with a very bitter taste in my mouth. Basically it seems to me that the judge, James R. Spencer, lacked the balls to make the right decision and urged the parties to settle so he didn't have to.
RIM have now paid around 600 million to prevent a nasty surprise. I understand the business logic, but from an ethical point of view, the whole thing stinks.

Will it now be swept under the carpet, or will the high profile this case had prompt the authorities to instigate some major patent law reform (and push the distinctly yellowish James R. Spencer into early retirement!)

While we are on the subject of RIM, I have never understood its dominance of the market. I mean, it's just push email, how hard is that!? Technically they do nothing substantial, but they have the interface, and that's what counts. Early adopters can use all kinds of other technical solutions to the push email 'problem', but for the masses, it just has to work, cleanly and simply. Blackberry does that better than anyone else; for now.

If you hold Blackberry stock, then you've done well and will will probably continue to do for a while. But the honeymoon period will not last forever and their barrier to entry for competitors is not that high, unless, as I've said before that they accept the patent was valid and pay the money, just to cement a very big barrier to entry!

Be nice, give yourself a Skype voucher

When you buy gift vouchers in Skype, you are credited with 5% of the value (if memory serves me correctly). A nice gesture from Skype for sharing some Skype goodness with your friends.

However, every once in a while, a little self-indulgence is good. Go into your Skype account and redeem one of your gift vouchers as a present to yourself!
You get the full value, effectively giving you a 5% discount on your usage.

Perhaps it's the Scotsman in me?

UMA rides again...

UMA has been on the blogs again recently. The opinions vary from Andrew Orlowski on El Reg saying it will be the death of Skype and Vonage, to Martin Geddes saying that's 'utter bollocks' and UMA isn't sensible or practical.
Well, the truth, I suspect, lies somewhere in between...
UMA could be the saviour of the mobile operators, allowing them to counter the spread of VoIP tools onto the handsets. If they do nothing, then they will surely lose out to the VoIP clients, because, as Martin says, 'Skype != telephony, It’s got other, useful, stuff'
But Martin goes on to say that he doesn't think Mobile Operators would be able to roll out a coherent IP strategy, whereas I think they have to do it, otherwise their mobile customers will rapidly go the way of the fixed line customers. There's no doubt that making UMA work properly isn't going to be a piece of cake, but mobile operators have enjoyed a bit of schadenfreude for too long about their fixed cousins fortunes, they didn't expect to be under threat themselves so soon.
UMA could be a sucess, if the mobile operators started buying up WiFi operators and made calling when in a hotspot an equivalent cost to VoIP applications. Consumers don't like complication, so not having to think about switching between 3G and VoIP will be one very good reason why UMA would be preferable to having 2 different identities (I say identities rather than phone numbers).
Now, this will obviously eat into mobile operators revenue fairly substantially, but at least it would remove some of the reasons for churn.

So in summary, here's a short list of questions and answers for the Mobile guys, so they can save their businesses in the long term:

Do I really have to start selling DSL, or partnering with someone who does? - Yes, no choice, but at least WiFi routers are cheaper than mobiles!
And access to WiFi hotspots in public places, I'm going to need them too? - Yep, no choice, you need a WiFi network to deliver the services that the VoIP guys are going to be giving!
Do I have to make UMA calls substantially cheaper than 3G calls? - Yes, no choice, if you don't then people will use VoIP wherever there's WiFi! (or make 3G calls the same as Voip calls for a really bold move!)
Do I have to start providing extra IP services, like messaging, file transfer, presence etc, all at much less than my business plan said I was going to? - Yes, no choice, if you don't, then you will lose customers to those services that do!
Why don't I just make the handset manufacturers hardwire everything to my network? - Call them up, see if they like the idea... You may find you have less control over them than you think.

All in all, UMA will be a bitter pill for the mobile operators to swallow. It is, however, better than seeing their customers exercising their right not to pay inflated charges for calls, by making them on someone elses network. (Of course, as I have said before, T-Mobile is in a better position than most, but clearly doesn't 'get it' yet).
If I was any other Mobile Operator, I would be looking seriously at a buyout or deep partnership with a major IP player. Services like shozu and mxit are how MMS and SMS should be evolving, but why have they not?

UMA is not a defensive move, it is an opportunity to embrace IP without losing your customers, take it while you still can.