IPTV

IPTV, or Internet Protocol delivering TeleVision (and not Iowa Public Television) is supposed to be a big market. These last few years, lots of companies have been investigating and some have been actually doing something. The subscriber levels for this year, 2006, is supposed to be 8.3 million, worldwide. But, only 500,000 of these subscribers are in the U.S. That is 6.02%... A lot of these subscribers are in western Europe, with Gartner indicating 3.3 million are there, this year. Other deployments are starting in Shanghai, Guangdong, and other Chinese cities.

The market is supposed to explode. Gartner is indicating a 5 fold increase in 4 years in western Europe and others indicating a roughly 4 fold increase worldwide, over the same timeframe, to 34 million total subscribers. At the high end of the speculation, 63 million subscribers have been quoted in the press.

If the U.S. has 500,000 subscribers now, who has them? Parts of Rural America, in that there are hundreds of Independent Operating Companies (IOCs) who are running IPTV today. Places like Ramondville, Texas and Lenora, Kansas. Nearer to me; Fallon, Nevada.

Outside the U.S., IPTV is rolling along, in places like Belgium and Brazil, Sweden and Slovenia, Ireland and Italy. With price sensitive Germans, the expectation of interactivity is expected to help generate money for the carriers. In France, it’s sold in consumer electronic stores, similar to our Best Buy or CompUSA. Gartner, again, predicts that by the end of this year, roughly half of IPTV subscribers will be in France. As the other western European country’s growth catches up, France will still keep a third of these subscribers.

Why haven’t we heard about this much here?

1. Elsewhere, the combination of low entry prices from competitors and incumbents (like France Telecom) and the idea that content from firms like the Pay per View players are willing to embrace new distribution channels. According to Gartner, however, a lot of the subscribers captured via this aggressive pricing have yet to be completely “hooked” on the IPTV service itself, it’s simply packaged as part of their “triple play” bundle. The factors that follow contribute to situations unique to those of us here in the U.S.
   
   
2. The phone companies, here, usually have copper, “twisted pair” for the “last mile” to your house. Running voice at 64kbps is what this last mile distribution was designed for. A pair of wires, and thus 2 possible phone lines for each house, who could want for more? A couple of decades ago, this was satisfactory thinking. DSL internet services, rolled out for the demand for broadband internet, uses this same twisted pair copper wire to get to a “DSL modem” in your house. The investment they’ve made in DSLAMs in the central office may not yet have paid off enough, for them to start to look at upgrades to this infrastructure. The newer services, such as streaming HD TV, or even a basic DVD movie compressed in MPEG2 (a popular video compression technique) is 5-7 Mbps of bandwidth that will obviously put a strain on this kind of infrastructure. So, either they must add hardware in the “last mile” part of the network, to enhance and strengthen signals to go farther or stay stronger or they must go to something the industry calls Fiber to the Curb (FTTC). Verizon calls this FiOS, or Fiber Optic Services, and they are pretty much ready to push the button. Very expensive stuff, but the market is seeing some action here from these smaller operators, the IOCs, rolling out fiber. In Sanborn, MN, where I grew up, Cable TV (which is also the phone company in Sanborn) service was so troublesome with an aging HFC network, that about 5-6 years ago, the Cable company dug up all of the streets and laid fiber to everyone’s house. My dad has fiber at his back door. Sanborn, MN – population 434. No IPTV yet, but he certainly has a pipe large enough if and when they finally offer such a service. A bigger population area, different fiscal issues, but as operators such as Verizon are demonstrating, not necessarily impossible to solve.
   
   
3. The U.S. legacy cable operators, the MSOs, have been delivering your standard TV over coax cable and this is called Hybrid/Fiber Coax or HFC (From the head-end to your neighborhood, it’s fiber, to a device on a telephone pole or in a vault, appropriately called, the “fiber node” and then it’s coaxial cable to your house). All of the channels are “broadcast” in separate frequency channels along this infrastructure simultaneously. Telephone service and regular internet service to your “cable modem” is delivered similarly, in a channels right alongside the video. Digital TV is delivered right down these same channels, encoded in something called QAM, decoded by your digital set-top-box. There is a lot of money invested here in this infrastructure and it is not yet financially compelling for the MSOs to change.
   
   
4. Communications Opportunity, Promotion and Enhancement (COPE) Act of 2006 – Specifically, this is the house version of the major overhaul of the last Telecom bill. The senate had it’s own involvement in the issue, but basically, we have a lot of rule making to be done before it’s clear who/what/where/when money will be made by this or that operator, distributor, content provider, etc. – too many rules, it’s hard for anyone to predict and thus only agile companies, ready to move after rulemaking, will gain rewards.
   
   
5. Telephone companies have never delivered TV content before. Sure, some are supplementing their voice and internet offerings with satellite TV, but let’s face it, they are just putting their name on the satellite TV offering from another company. Licensing, broadcasting, distribution rights – well, the MSOs have a lead in this space.
   
   
6. The MSOs and satellite companies offer premium content right now, some of it in High Definition, or HD. To compete, and IPTV offering must be better than the MSOs level of the playing field. Better technologically: Effectively, it must be better than what European and Asian operators are delivering in the early MPEG2 encoding technology. It’s almost expected now, that a true offering must be multiple HD streams, each 12-20 Mbps – not 5-7 Mbps. They also must offer DVR or “TiVo-like” services, either home based or network based, for the streams coming into the home or the movie libraries the carrier is involved with. Sometimes it is barely likely that 5 Mbps is getting down to you, must less multiple HD TV streams. The “broadcast flag” issue over who owns the right to push advertising at you and force you to watch it (also tied into the Senate bill) may hinder IPTV’s acceptance, particularly if it screws up who can and cannot produce the devices that will “play back” IPTV. Better services: Interactivity (think sports betting in some countries) may be key for adoption, something that is harder to do in today's world (not to mention that gambling is a real political problem here in the U.S.). The success of SMS texting linked to reality TV has shown the desire for the public to interact, paying real money, but with SMS the revenue is going to a wireless carrier, not necessarily the IPTV carrier. So, interactivity within the platform (think "Deal or No Deal" kinds of interactivity.)
   
   
7. Finally, distributing this streaming mess of bits around the house to what ever device needs it, The HDTV set, a desktop computer, a 2nd TV set, a laptop computer. Should this be Ethernet? Or Ethernet over Power cabling? Or WiFi? It’s this last point that a small company, named Ruckus Wireless, with several announcements this last week, is becoming a key player. They secured $16 million in additional financing from telco and electronics company’s VC arms. They also announced shipping wireless product for reliably delivering these video streams within the house, thus eliminating the potential wiring mess a consumer or professional installer would have to undertake. A lot of their technology is involved in the dynamic tuning aspect of the antenna systems. Essentially, they “beam” the bits to the TV set, instead of 360 degree broadcast to everyone nearby, because the antenna system locates the remote station and “locks on”. Problems with walls and beams are resolved in this manner. Essentially, Ethernet performance, without the physical cable. Ruckus has indicated that industry-wide there is an approximate cost of $400-500 for a 3 room install as part of IPTV launching. This is per subscriber.
   

So, quite a lot that has to come together before you can literally sit down in your favorite chair, flip on the HD to watch your favorite game over an IP infrastructure. Except, if you are in Wyoming or Kansas.

Saving a Single Life – Asteroids??

About 11 years ago, Gregory Benford, noted science fiction author and physicist (on the faculty of the Department of Physics and Astronomy at the University of California, Irvine) wrote in a column that saving a single life in 1995 dollars would cost

• $200, in third world countries (usually due to malnutrition)
• $75,000, in advanced nations (cancer screening)
• $120,000, in USA (highway safety agencies, better highway dividers, easier on-ramps, etc.)
• $1,000,000, in USA (to avoid one case of deadly lung disease by having better air pollution controls)
• $5,000,000, in USA (to eliminate natural radioactivity in drinking water, which is why we don't do it)
• $2,500,000,000, in USA (for nuclear plant safety)
• For about 600 times the cancer screening rate, or $50,000,000 per year, killer asteroids could be identified and eliminated from threatening the earth.
  
  

This last point has always intrigued me, particularly when that Bruce Willis movie came out a couple of years ago.

The ABC Science Show had an interview with Sima Adhya, a space mission scientist at QinetiQ in Great Britain. This interview aired September 23, in which the asteroid proposition was again discussed, but in more current terms and with some ideas about how to actually do something like this, Hollywood not withstanding.

A link to the transcript and podcast of that broadcast is here http://www.abc.net.au/rn/scienceshow/stories/2006/1744501.htm and here http://www.abc.net.au/rn/podcast/feeds/ssw_20060923.mp3

The European Space Agency is planning to send two spacecraft in about 5 years to an asteroid about 30 million miles away. It will take another 5 years after launch to get to the asteroid. So from Benford’s earlier notation to now, 11 years passes. In 10-11 more years we shall find out some other things about this particular issue.

The plan is to have one spacecraft go into orbit around the target asteroid. It will be in charge of measuring the mass, density, finer details on it’s speed and direction, and other information about the asteroid. The second spacecraft (which will be about the size of a refrigerator) will crash into the asteroid (about 100 meters long) while the first one will watch, taking even more measurements.

In this David and Goliath move, scientists are hoping to alter the orbit of the asteroid by a very, very small amount. According to this interview, the expectation is a few millimeters per second, but at 30 million miles away, this event and the alteration will add up over time and distance. If the asteroid were indeed on a collision course with the Earth, such a minute adjustment in direction would allow the asteroid to miss the Earth completely.

As a prototype proposal for activity they are actually proceeding with, I’m impressed with the European scientific community.

But more to the point, if this works, then obviously real money estimates will come out of the exercise. Ultimately we may see if Benford’s estimates were in the ball park or not. Commercial interests might include reduction of risk on the part of the insurance industry. I’m sure they’d rather fund a space flight so that in 5 years a killer asteroid might be deflected and thus reduce to nil any claims at all from such a tragedy.

Perhaps the biggest problem is convincing anyone to actually do the kind of follow-up activities needed. The odds of an extinction level event are so small, and because of this, it is assumed that these odds are zero, when in fact they are just very close to zero. My sense is that this low risk will always be weighed against actually doing something.

Of course, the other thought is that we would rather be living here without a dinosaur type extinction event, no matter what, than try to live here after one…

DECT Technology Coming to the U.S.

DECT, or Digital Enhanced Cordless Telecommunications, is coming to the U.S. in a move largely framed by the FCC and the DECT forum, an industry association that has been lobbying the FCC for some changes to previous rules.

What in the world is DECT? Well, first of all, the “E” used to stand for European, as this was largely a cellular telecommunications system that is built with small cell sizes, roughly about 600 feet in diameter, originally coming from Europe. It has enjoyed some success there, where it has been standardized, by ETSI, the European standards body involved in Telco. Their work on DECT started in the late 1980’s culminating in the first ETSI standard in 1992.

Earlier in the 1980’s, work was being done to develop the technology, which largely centered on work in the UK and in Sweden. Perhaps the first driver was to digitally “enhance” the analog cordless phone offerings that were starting to show up, at that time, from Asian manufacturers. Digital, of course, was better than Analog – less “crackle” and interference, higher density of phones in a given space, security, moving between “cells”, just like the regular mobile phone network, but with unlicensed users rather than the more formal and really high-tech cellular base station that belongs to the mobile phone company and serves hundreds of users over much larger cell sizes.

These were all reasons for DECT, not necessarily for the individual at home, but more for the business user, perhaps with a large space to cover, like a warehouse, and/or lots of people needing service, such as an office type of setup. Mobility is the name of the game, rather than a fixed phone at your desk. This is not to say that business is the only user of this technology, almost since the beginning, manufacturers have been offering business and domestic types of offerings, with Siemen’s Gigaset being an example of among the first, and continuing on through today with newer and newer models. Today, you can purchase a Gigaset that is coupled with Yahoo! Messenger w/Voice capabilities, the VoIP offer from Yahoo.

The standards have covered and defined the radio part of this link between handset and basestation as well as the handover that occurs between the basestation and an office switchboard (PABX) or public telco switch (or your local terminal adapter in the VoIP case).

Largely, what has changed to allow this technology to move to our shores has been a decision by the FCC late last year to set aside some radio spectrum in the 1920-1930 MHz frequencies for unlicensed users. Originally, this spectrum was to be sold off in the PCS auctions and there was an FCC requirement for new users to pay a sizeable fee to help relocate existing users of the radio spectrum. Some changes to the channelization requirements and a significantly lower fee have helped to make the U.S. market more attractive. In Europe, DECT operates in a different frequency band, 1880-1900 MHz.

Why is this better than what we have today for digital cordless phones? Better range is often cited as one advantage over existing 2.4 Ghz or 5.8 GHz phones. Other things to note are simultaneous calls on a number of handsets, quality of service, security, no-toll internal calls (think PBX extension to extension types of calls), ability to handoff call from one cell to the next (which means a very large area, like an entire warehouse, can be covered with lots of base stations), push-to-talk, and of course, Voice over IP (VoIP) integration.

Interference is less at 1920 MHz because a company may have their Wireless LAN setup and running at 2.4 GHz or 5.8 GHz. Other interference usually comes from baby monitors and microwave ovens. A lot of firms marketing in this area are focused on small to medium businesses, largely due to the expectation that a really large enterprise will have voice and data integrated together in their Wireless LAN infrastructure and not need DECT, because they would be probably expected to have Voice over WiFi types of phones, sometimes noted with the “VoWLAN” acronym. A small company may not have the resources, nor the money, to fully integrate voice and data on their own Wireless LAN infrastructure.

Who is bring this to the US? SpectraLink is one such company, having recently acquired Kirk Telecom of Denmark. Kirk is one of the leading suppliers of DECT equipment in the EU. SpectraLink’s main focus will be on small to medium sized enterprise business products. There will be some consumer products. Uniden is introducing its first set of cordless phone products based on DECT, announced just this week. Uniden had earlier announced an equity purchase and partnership with SunCorp Technologies of Hong Kong, another manufacturer of DECT products.

So, perhaps some advantages for a small to medium business looking to push into wireless handset technologies for it’s employees, i.e., where mobility of the employee and communications needs both need to be met for employee productivity, but where they may not want to make the larger fiscal and more complex jump into VoWLAN. And this from a piece of technology that has had a decade to mature.

USB Thumb Drives - what are they good for?

Lately, I've been exploring how to take my data “with me,” so to speak. The vehicle I’m thinking about is a little “flash memory” USB Thumb Drive. I think they were named for the way you use your thumb to push them into the USB port on your computer. That and the fact that they seem to fit, oh so ergonomically, between thumb and forefinger.

The proliferation of these USB “Thumb Drives” is widespread enough, operating support is good enough, and cost has dropped to low enough levels that on those occasions where I don’t need to or want to travel with my laptop (or for those who have desktops and thus no mobility), but I still want to have some important files with me, they make the perfect vehicle.

(Since I live in California, we take Emergency Preparedness seriously out here).

As technology improves, becomes part of our lives, we find ourselves hampered if we don’t have access to our “information” no matter where we are. Some of our more important information, stored on this kind of technology is just the answer. These standalone USB Thumb drives come in various capacities, 128mb, 512mb, 2gb – and a few sizes in between, with cost going up as capacity goes up. Yesterday’s “dead tree” paper had advertisements from the local electronics store offering a 512mb thumb drive for less that $15, another store had a sale for a 2gb version for $19 after mail-in rebates. Online stores have similar deals, although you’ll have to pay extra for shipping, generally.

So, just how, exactly, can this be useful?

First, maybe you’re at your friend’s house, you want to show him a website you’ve talked about at dinner. You saved it to your “favorites”, but you don’t have your computer with you and the URL was a bit complicated and you don’t remember it exactly. If you could only have access to your Internet Explorer “Favorites”, you’d be able to show him… these little flash memory cards built so that the operating system recognizes them as a small hard drive, and once they are plugged into the USB port, they are immediately recognized as a new hard drive, and you thus have access to all the files on the little flash drive. Just copy the Favorites folder from your PC onto this drive, BAM! You’ve got a copy of all of your bookmarked URL’s in a form factor you can put into your shirt pocket.

Second idea: keep a copy of your Quicken or Microsoft Money files on the USB drive, just in case you’re out of the house and it burns down. Terrible thing to think about, but if your computer went up in the fire, how much trouble would you now be in from the record keeping standpoint? Could you recreate those Quicken transactions?

This is one of the most basic things to think about for Emergency Preparedness of the electronic kind. Don’t misunderstand; full back-ups of your hard drive are still very important to do. Burn this “full backup” to a CD or DVD and keep that copy in the trunk of your car or at your office. But these flash memory USB drives now have sufficient capacity to hold your Quicken data and will also suffice in case something bad has happened to your computer. Just plug the USB drive into a USB port on anyone’s computer, those files become instantly accessible.

Here is another idea: If you do anything on the web, you know there is a proliferation of userids and passwords that can get assigned to you. One for your HMO’s website to order prescriptions; one for the insurance company website; another for your email (sure you can have your email reader remember this, but you should write it down somewhere, too); another for online banking; one for the online newspaper; this list goes on and on…

Now Internet Explorer and Firefox (and some of the email clients) offer to remember this stuff as a convenience for you, but hopefully you’ve been writing this stuff down somewhere. Perhaps in your address book, perhaps on a piece of paper you keep in your wallet, maybe on a sticky you tape to your computer screen or bottom of the keyboard, but just how secure is that? Some people will enter this into a word document and then they keep this file on their computer. OK, but you better back this file up; just in case you can’t remember the passwords and there is a fire at your house. These USB Thumb drives are just the thing for backing this kind of file up as well.

Now a new issue comes to mind, however, in that if you loose this little Thumb drive, all someone needs to do is plug it into the USB port of a computer and all of your files are available to that person. People are going to do this even if your name and phone is on the outside, people are just plain curious. If you don’t label it on the outside, someone who finds the USB drive is going to just naturally stick it into a computer, just to see who’s device this is. Honorable or not, you don’t want them to have full access to your information? Even if you put your little word document of passwords into a file on this USB drive and turn a password on for the document, you’re still not fully protected from someone who is really smart. Cracking and hacking tools abound that allow you to get past this level of security. This is true for the WinZip and related programs which encrypt files as they are compressing them together.

The good news is that there are programs to alleviate some concerns in this area. TrueCrypt is one program which will protect your data, keeping it really secure as long as you pick a good password to protect things. Another example of one such program for userid/password information is PINS, a secure Password Manager which is freeware, meaning that it really doesn’t cost anything. Mike Wojtowicz has done a great job of putting this program together.

So, run this from your hard drive, day to day, editing passwords as you need to, and from time to time, copy the folder that contains the program and data files onto the USB drive, pop it into your shirt pocket, and take it with you. The same would be true for a “virtual drive” that TrueCrypt might be protecting, copy it to the USB drive from time to time.

Since all of these userid/passwords are protected by one overall password, you only need to remember the one password to have access to all of them. Of course, you should choose a password that is not easily guessed, examples that ARE easy to guess are your name or one of your kid’s names and a number (a recent study indicated that this is the most popular password that people will pick). Pick a phrase that means something special to you, like “August21isourweddinganniversary” and you have a 31 character password that includes a capital letter and has numbers imbedded in it. This is pretty secure.

So, there are 3 things you can put on one of these USB “Thumb” drives that can be useful to you.

1. Your “Favorites” folder so you can browse to your favorite websites, even if you’re at someone else’s computer
2. Your financial data, so in case the worst happens, you have relatively fast access to your information (don’t forget the installation disk or CD for the program that manages this data, again, just in case). Remember to secure the data so it doesn’t fall into the wrong hands.
3. Your passwords, stored in a secure form

Just this morning, about 2 blocks away, a house fire occurred at about 815 a.m. and thankfully everyone got out. The fire started in the garage, cause yet unknown, and the remainder of the house is still standing. The lady that lives there picked up her computer and took it with her this afternoon, more worried about thieves stealing it tonight. I asked her if she had backups of the data on that computer, in case the worst had happened and no she didn’t.

So, before something bad happens, do something.

Mobile Phones for Kids

Mobile Phones for kids? An interesting concept, and one which Disney Mobile, working off the Disney brand, hopes will be engaging enough for parents to purchase the extra phone and perhaps a few extra minutes under the family’s “plan”.

The big money may be in the parent’s plan and usage, getting the parents to switch to Disney Mobile and then add in the small extras that the children’s usage represents. Continuing to build brand-loyalty, by offering these extra services such as tracking the location of the phone (and thus the child) as well as controlling the usage of the child, no indiscriminate texting or calling unless it’s an emergency (and no, calling Suzie does not constitute an emergency) – these are good concepts. And unlike, ESPN Mobile, they appear to be poised to succeed.

Keeping parents and kids more in contact with each other (“Where should I pick you up after dance class?” or “Where are you going after the library?”), controlling usage so it doesn’t break the bank (with call and text restrictions during certain hours). You won’t get this initially from the commercials (which are now flooding TV and other outlets), there the message is aimed at the kids and how cool it is – thus the lobbying of you, the parent starts – coupled with the peers and perhaps older siblings, flaunting them at school using them everywhere.

Note, some schools have banned their use during school hours, so check with your kid’s school and if you get your child a mobile phone, from Disney Mobile or another operator, educate your child. Confiscation for the remainder of the year does no good for either you or the child. The reasons schools are so strict on mobile phones is because they (and pagers before them) have been used for crime (drug dealing, starting fights, porn) and even cheating on tests. Kids are pretty smart – there is even a ring tone that most adults over 30 cannot hear. Just Google “Mosquitotone”… Soon, a visual Mosquitotone detector for teachers appeared on the market. This is just like military strategy on a battlefield…

If your child walks a distance to school and you’re concerned about any aspect of safety, maybe you’ve been already thinking about this… After a little investigation, you will find that not only Disney, but other carriers as well, have surprisingly low cost plans to add the extra phone to a “family” plan. Disney Mobile, in it’s advertisements, is touting the GPS (Global Positioning System) features later in their commercials, so via your phone or a website, you can find out where the phone is and presumably where your child is. Disney does not exclusively have this feature (remember the little red dots of the Sprint Nextel commercials?).

You may be thinking that a mobile phone for your child is unnecessary. They are alien to our own childhoods, and if you’ve immigrated recently to this country they may be really alien (South Africa didn’t have TV until the 70’s). As a parent, the joy is to decide what is necessary vs. automatically giving them everything that everyone else has. You should decide based on today’s world, today’s issues, rather than your childhood world.

Remember, in the 80’s children were coming home from school and spending hours on the phone, a separate land line phone wired into their room, talking to their friends and dates. In the late 90’s, with the advent of instant messenger services from AOL, Yahoo and MSN, they were IM’ing each other. So, the paradigm shifts yet again…

Price should also be in your consideration, mobile phones are easy to loose, but with the GPS services and the cost being relatively reasonable, this part of the issue has continued to be minimized. Literally, it is not so much of a financial consideration as it was 2-5 years ago.

Like any piece of technology, it can be promoted as a lifesaver or disdained as a yet another “gimmie”. Especially if your child wants to be independent and he/she is aware or notified (as some of the services promote) when you are tracking him/her. Your child may wonder if you’re going to let them breathe anytime soon.

My advise, investigate the plans, note the features and prices. As parents, talk to each other about the pros and cons, then engage with your child, find out how they would use it, educate them on the issues at school and elsewhere. Make an informed decision.

Good luck.