
Well, here we go again! This time, rural Nebraska. I start out by landing in Sioux Falls, SD, drive south east to Sioux City IA to commute daily into Nebraska. I'm not sure what to expect, but as usual I'll share it here on this blog.
"An improvement over Windows Mobile 6 released in February 2007 the new version, unsurprisingly named 6.1, will be a stop-gap measure to keep both consumers and industry happy until the launch of Windows Mobile 7."New features include a new fonts, a new homescreen and features such as a task manager and copying and pasting in Internet Explorer.
There has been a lot of discussion about convergence lately. Based on some recent interest in this information, here is part III of a primer on this trend and what it means to all of us; not just in telecommunications, but in all facets of the business world.
As we discussed earlier, many companies had tried and failed with early forms of convergence. Many of these failures occurred simply because the wrong network was chosen to converge upon. In part II, we looked at AT&T (coaxial cable) and Sprint (ATM) and how these choices decimated nearly destroyed these companies. The choice of today’s integrators is TCP/IP.
Whether or not it is run over the actual Internet or another network, TCP/IP is the language of the Internet. It is superior for the simple reason that it is dumb. Unlike other network types such as ATM and Frame Relay, TCP/IP does not rely on error correction. In other words, so called “Intelligent networks” constantly measure the quality of the information they send insuring QoS (Quality of Service). If a packet of data is not delivered, the network will look for it and deliver it eventually. Sounds good if we’re sending documents, but worthless if you’re trying to make a phone call. The last thing you’d want is the garbled bits of talk that dropped off your call delivered at the end of the sentence. Worse, all that error correction slows the network down.
TCP/IP has no error correction. It is not an intelligent network – quite the opposite. When something is sent and there’s a problem, the message just gets lost. That sounds bad, but its not; As described earlier, if part of the phone conversation falls out, you don’t want it back at the end. It’s the whole concept of dumb cars on smart roads.
Think of the data packets as cars on the road; the road has no intelligence, just the cars (or really, the drivers). If someone is lost, it’s not the road’s responsibility; it’s the cars’. This is a far more efficient system. The same is true of TCP/IP.
Now with TCP/IP as the medium for the converged terrestrial network, anything can be delivered or sent so long as the price is right, and for all the reasons I mentioned earlier, IP is also, cheap. Did I say cheap? It’s getting cheaper all the time.
Fiber-optic cable costs less than copper wire, and the per-megabit rate continues to drop. In 1995, I worked for AT&T and sold my first T1.5 for the shockingly low price of $6,600 per month (that’s 1.44 megabits per second of IP). My fellow sales people were amazed that I was granted a rate of less than $10,000 from the pricing department. By comparison, last month I purchased FIOS from Verizon for my home: 15 megabits per second for $35 per month, delivered by fiber-optic cable.
NEXT WEEK: Convergence in other areas of telco
Alabama, Arkansas, California, Colorado, Connecticut, Delaware, Florida, Georgia, Idaho, Illinois, Indiana, Iowa, Kansas, Kentucky, Louisiana, Maine, Maryland, Massachusetts, Minnesota, Mississippi, Missouri, Nebraska, New Hampshire, New Jersey, New Mexico, New York, North Carolina, North Dakota, Ohio, Oregon, Pennsylvania, South Carolina, South Dakota, Tennessee, Texas, Vermont, Virginia, Washington, Washington DC, West Virginia, Wisconsin, Wyoming
The RCP, which essentially consists of a processor, radios, specialized software, and an antenna, is an appealing way to connect remote areas that otherwise would go without the Internet, says Galinovsky. Wireless satellite connections are expensive, he points out. And it's impractical to wire up some villages in Asian and African countries. 'You can't lay cable,' he says. 'It's difficult, expensive, and someone is going to pull it up out of the ground to sell it.'"
The point-to-point technology requires two nodes which could provide full back-end infrastructure for less than $1,000.
"A femtocell is the world's worst name for a very exciting technology. It's a box (about the size of a router) that you connect to your broadband router; it essentially gives you your very own cell phone tower, right in your home."More...
There has been a lot of discussion about convergence lately. Based on some recent interest in this information, here is part II of a primer on this trend and what it means to all of us; not just in telecommunications, but in all facets of the business world.
Convergence is not a new concept: telecommunications companies have been attempting similar tricks for years. By combining services that traditionally require different transport methods, fewer networks are needed. Fewer networks need less maintenance, less facilities, etc. The trick is to find the network that will effectively do the job.
In the late 90s, AT&T used it’s resources to purchase enough cable TV properties to become the largest cable provider in the US. AT&T had little interest in running a television operation; their goal was to get local and long distance services on these existing cable networks. Although this technology had been tried (at least 4 times) before, the new CEO C. Michael Armstrong believed it could be done now and was willing to bet his and the company’s future on it. Did it work? Today Armstrong is the semi-retired chairman of Johns Hopkins Medicine and AT&T was recently purchased by a company it spun-off, SBC (shortly after purchase, SBC changed it’s name to AT&T, a more recognizable moniker).
Another example is Sprint’s experiment with convergence, called ION – short for Integrated, On-demand Network. Sprint’s idea was to use its well-designed and maintained ATM over SONET network to deliver different services. The plan was to bring Sprint’s network directly to the premise (home or business) through a miniature ATM switch. The marketing was simple: just like electricity is turned up as needed, ATM could be turned-up similarly. If more telephone service, Internet or video conferencing was needed (television may have been on the radar as well), service could just be “cranked-up”.
Sprint blew over $80 Billion on this project before they pulled the plug. They concluded that ION was truly a project ahead of its time. They were probably right. While they were correct about the coming need for convergence, running telephone and IP over ATM(!?!) was not the way to go. All but the largest companies had no use for ATM by the early ‘00s.
NEXT WEEK: Why IP networks are the best choice
![]() |
Chester Heights |
There has been a lot of discussion about convergence lately. Based on some recent interest in this information, I present a primer on this trend and what it means to all of us; not just in the telecommunications business, but in all facets of the business world.
First, we need to define the term. According to Wikipedia, Technological convergence refers to a trend where some technologies having distinct functionalities evolve to technologies that overlap, i.e. multiple products come together to form one product, with the advantages of each initial component. As it applies here, convergence is the merging of different services that once traveled separate networks. By delivering them over fewer networks, economies of scale are achieved. The best example of this is the current merging of Internet, telephone and television over one IP-based network. Every telephone company worldwide is either doing this now in one form or another or at a minimum, in the exploration phase knowing they are late to the party.
More interestingly, in this effort to save money by converging services, telephone companies have found new competition as they enter the television business. Not surprisingly, the companies that supply these services (cable, primarily) have entered the telco’s markets for the very same reason. For example, Verizon very much wants to sell television service to Internet customers over their brand-new FIOS network. Their plan is to get a fiber-optic line into customer’s homes (FTTH) to provide these services. By delivering fiber, Verizon hopes to not only provide Internet, telephone and television (also known as the “Triple Play”), but to shut out the possibility of a competitor entering their market. The competitor they are most concerned with, at least in the northeast US, is Comcast. Comcast and other cable companies are looking to bundle the same three services and shut out anyone else. They all believe that whomever can get to the customer first will own them forever. That is why they are willing to spend great sums of money to install these networks. Its been reported that it costs Verizon upwards of $800 per subscriber to install FIOS (that figure is an improvement over the original $1,200 or so it originally cost). This does not include the door-to-door, mailing and other marketing costs that VZ must bear as well