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Now that I have been listed as a blog to watch by the mega “A” list telecom blogger Martin Geddes of Telepocalypse, I feel obligated to produce some profound essay that will alter the landscape. Seems that I have shown up with only a simple hand spade, so let me plant some seeds and see what they will grow into.

I guess a logical first step is to declare what this blog is about with something of more sustenance than my welcoming post. Alec Saunders set quite a precedent for manifestos with his Voice2.0 post. And if that was not enough, he has updated it recently. Since I don’t have the proletariat up in arms for a revolution, I’d like to consider something less jarring than a manifesto, something like JP Rangaswami’s kernel. Hopefully a the kernel analogy will suite this blog well given you reap what you sow.

Although this is a technical blog, I am going to start out with a bit of economics, specifically the effect communications has on business and how telecom as a business will be affected. With the information revolution approaching the half century mark we are now able to see the impact to business - an unbundling of its concerns as portrayed by Richard Langlois’s organizations and markets and expanded by John Hagel and John Seely Brown’s edge competencies. A vanishing hand, according to Langlois, has replaced the visible hand of Ronald Coase’s firm and Joseph Schumpeter’s entrepreneurial corporation. The hand reference being a nod to John Adam’s invisible hand which described the natural inclinations that make markets work. Given the pervasive availability of a modern communications network the world has shrunk another order of magnitude similar to when the steam engine train was introduced at the same point of the industrial revolution. Modern communications now affords distributed and modular systems that are highly specialized. Vertical integration, i.e. the visible hand, no longer translates to savings as the transaction cost of the long tail economy approaches zero. Life will not bode well for the corporation that does not heed theses changes

Now, let us consider a worker at this same inflection point of the information revolution. Through Moore’s law we have eked out most of the productivity we can expect from transactional tasks. Now add Metcalf’s law where the value of a network increases (to some limit that is upwardly bounded by an exponential curve, but probably less) as its nodes increase. Apply this to the problem of tacit tasks, where today’s worker is faced with complex, multidimensional problems in a collaborative environment and we have yet another potential boost in productivity that is only now being quantified.

Economics aside, what about the influence of technology on the telecom? For me it comes down to three broad shifts:

Broadband will become pervasive. This means my parents will not have dial-up, I will no longer have to lean backwards in my chair at Starbucks to get the VoIP client to work and I will not have to synchronize my viewing habits with the ebbs and flows of my shared cable line. Most importantly, I will not have to exert any unreasonable amount of brain power on figuring out how to become connected. This will be a multi-faceted problem not solved by some killer wireless technology of the moment or reckless Network Neutrality legislation but by sound business and technological propositions.

The network moves from fully-connected to hyper-connected. With Italy surpassing 100% mobile phone penetration, or at least the industry coming to terms that there might be more than one SIM per user, there will no longer be a one to one ratio of users to nodes on the network. Think of how many IP addresses are in your pockets. Now add the RFID networks, sensor networks and whatever network you need to support telematics and you get a lot of nodes. Moreover, these will not be isolated networks - in the future your coordination for dinner plans just might include a conversation with the refrigerator.

The network is the computer. Ok, so we tried this once before, but this time it will stick. And don’t read this as some proponent’s rant for smart pipes versus dumb pipes. The essence here is the proper respect of the law of layers by both technologists and politicians. That is non-discriminatory horizontal communications is facilitated through vertical transparency. Agnostic behavior toward an application (or any layer for that matter) is a direct result of how the data in the upper layer is treated by the lower layer - a principle known as encapsulation. Furthermore, this transparency should not be mistaken as some direct result of the end-to-end principal, but rather a consequence of the layered architecture of the Internet itself. The end-to-end principle then emerges from the layered model as an articulation and abstraction of its implicit ideals. When business models, policy, services and applications do not violate the separation of layers you no longer get walled gardens or misaligned legislation. In fact you can enhance layers, e.g. make the pipe smarter with something like mobility, and get a better peer-to-peer service.

It is getting late and since this is only a draft I shall quit here. I hope to move this off to its own page and expand it further. Please send me your thoughts on these items so I incorporate them in future editions.