DSL Prime News Briefs

Not so brief this week!

by Dave Burstein of DSL Prime and Future of TV [March 11, 2008]

Briefs

• The new Chinese law provides that after ten years workers can only be fired for cause. While I'm sure there are loopholes, I'm sure the 50,000 people being fired at Alcatel, Siemens, Deutsche Telekom, AT&T, Centillium, and so many more could use protection like that. The principle leads to a more harmonious society.
  
  
• FIOS is coming to Buffalo, New York soon. Or so I conclude from Verizon placing an EE Times ad for a video engineer for the snowy city.
  
  
• I'm trying to analyze whether Verizon has decided to give up the open access battle because they are likely to lose. Tauke is smart about cutting losses, and D.C. is currently turning against them. David Clark and David Clark were very persuasive presenters. Their brilliance mattered, and many from D.C. were impressed to hear comments made out of conviction, not for pay. FIOS can handle just about anything you throw at it, and Seidenberg has long considered it his trump against the cablecos.

Press

• "Apple would offer only those programs that it approves" is Laurie Flynn's take on the iPhone's new SDK. Her NY Times colleague Saul Hansell adds "One of the iPhone's more intriguing features is that it has a motion sensor that can detect movement, and acceleration, in three dimensions. This is handy for games, of course, but it also can be used to make an interface for other applications as well. Now as you walk down the airplane aisle, you will not only see people watching and listening to their iPhones, you'll see them wiggling and shaking them too. Just don't wiggle anything Steve Jobs doesn't approve of." If you haven't discovered the Bits blog at the Times, you might be surprised at the quality of the coverage. More substance than almost any of the most popular tech blogs. Saul had a remarkable remark from Stan Glascow of Sony. "The Blu-ray Association, the group that controls the Blu-ray standard, has not licensed it to any manufacturers in China. (Cheap players from China were a large part of the collapse of the DVD player market.) 'Will there be Chinese players? Yes,' [Glascow] said. 'We don't need to drive that and hand the technology over' any time soon, he said." Early in the Blu-ray versus HD fight, insiders told me cutting out the Chinese with patent and trade barriers was a crucial Sony goal. The HD-DVD guys were more open to working with China, which would bring prices down for everyone.

Wall Street

• Sandvine is getting clobbered, with both sales and the stock down by more than 50 percent. They have time to regroup, with over $100 million of working capital, after raising $50 million in an offering the middle of last year. Many orders for traffic shaping gear have been postponed. DOCSIS 3.0 is at least twelve times as fast as what the cable guys now have, so Sandvine will need to move beyond traffic shaping soon. Congestion won't disappear, but it should be much less of a problem with the faster network.

People

• Joe Weizenbaum died, EE Times reports. We lost a great engineer and a good man. He was publicly famous for creating Eliza in 1966, a remarkable program that fooled many people into believing a human being, not a program, was on the other side. He was both a pioneer in artificial intelligence and its greatest skeptic. His 1976 book, Computer Power and Human Reason, has proven prophetic about many of the limits of AI. He escaped the Nazis when he was twelve, but had moved back to his old neighborhood in Berlin after retiring from MIT. What he said 20 years ago can easily be applied to broadband. "Perhaps the computer, as well as many other of our machines and techniques, can yet be transformed, following our own authentically revolutionary transformation, into instruments to enable us to live harmoniously with nature and with one another. But one prerequisite will first have to be met: there must be another transformation of man. And it must be one that restores a balance between human knowledge, human aspirations, and an appreciation of human dignity such that man may become worthy of living in nature."

International Notes

• From CESL: David Gross and Gary Shapiro deserve credit for stretching the CES show by bringing in some very thoughtful international visitors. SUPERCOMM in its glory days was the finest telecom event in the world, with a massive group of worldwide visitors. CES is increasingly playing that role, as well as being the greatest toy store in the world. Paul Kagame. President of Rwanda, is hoping to use technology to bring his country out of poverty. I discovered from Tsutomu Sato of Japan that their broadband prices actually are higher than I thought. The State Department supported Technology and Emerging Countries program didn't draw a large crowd, but I hope it continues next year. I recently saw a projection that two billion people will soon have mobile phones, with the minority in the developed world. Seemed like half the press room came from abroad, which can only be good for U.S. exports. Shapiro doesn't have Gross' title of Ambassador, but his comments reviewing this item were remarkably diplomatic. I had made some comments about weak U.S. competition, but he carefully disagreed. CEA is giving Ivan Seidenberg their Digital Patriot Award April 2, and Shapiro personally raves about his FIOS at home and the choices he has. He added "the FCC has done a great job," so I've moved my comments into a different item.
  
  
• Dave Weinberger, one of the most innovative thinkers about the web, blogged something "unthinkable" in the U.S. "Those who sell access to the Internet should not also be selling content and services over the Internet." Maybe he's right, and the antitrust authorities should split the TV programming away from the telcos and cablecos. They will always be tempted to limit TV competition. One senior officer of a Bell years ago told me, "They are letting the cable guys have a walled garden, and they are not going to stop us." Weinberger's extraordinary book, Everything is Miscellaneous, was enormously influential as we planned Jennie's coming book on web video. We just couldn't find an organization of the material that would fit the needs of many different readers. Eventually, we accepted there was no "one way" to order the printed book, and we needed to choose a compromise. Everything is Miscellaneous makes clear that most knowledge is like that, working best only when you have multiple ways to access the information. That's of course limited in a printed book, but more practical on the web. Remember that when you write an instruction or employee manual, a FAQs, or your terms of service. Nobody wants to read from the beginning to find the information they need.

Policy at end

• To follow up on Viviane Reding's opinions on GPON and VDSL, check out The Access Revolution: an evolutionof regulation for competition', a light weight .pdf file.

Copyright 2008 Dave Burstein.
The DSL Prime Newsletter is reprinted with permission.

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