Convergence + Divergence = FiWi

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Read more! Only a few days ago, someone very techy I have known for a long while said during a conversation about fat pipes, "I still haven't worked out what the killer app will be". My instant response was video as I strongly believe that we are heading towards a virtual reality scenario where making a video call will become as natural as making a mobile call now is for the vast majority of the world. Perhaps we should call this 'virtual naturality'?

This blog post can be read at http://5tth.blogspot.com


However, we should not even be thinking of the term "killer app" any more. The term came from the world of commerce who saw it as the golden goose which would lay the most profitable egg. It comes from a boom and bust, bubbly world that focuses on money before all else. It came from a need to 'justify the Internet' - how bizarre that sounds today?

From a network point of view, the killer app has also potentially had a less positive feel - could there be an app that would break the network? Some of us have always hoped that there was as it would highlight the inefficiencies and design faults within the core network and mean it would need to be fixed before ere long and hence remove that bottleneck and break the scarcity model once and for all!

Killer App becomes Killer Cap, as in capacity, capability?

I digress...I have been thinking about convergence and divergence recently. Convergence because we are all seeing new devices etc which overlap and bring unexpected features and functionality into easy reach. Divergence because we are moving away from expected models and futures because of the convergence.

For those of us who have been banging on about Fibre To The Home, fat pipes, and FiWi (increasingly), there has never been a need for a single killer app to prove our point that people need to be able to do precisely what they want to do over a network wherever they are, whenever they choose to and however they want to do it.

People will do what they choose and applications will rise and fall in popularity, meaning that the network must be sufficiently capable of dealing with the vagaries of human nature and differing interests far more than it needs to be able to cope with a killer app. (It also needs to cope with "consumers are also creators", and asymmetry is the biggest problem here once people have sufficient bandwidth and the devices to share what they have created.)

However, convergence has meant that the mobile phone has taken a starring role in driving forward application development and hence network usage. Mobiles have introduced more people to technology than computers have. Whilst digital video cameras may be expensive, the video on your mobile is usually more than sufficient to 'capture a moment' and MMS, Bluetooth etc have meant sharing it, whether via the Internet eg Youtube, Facebook etc or directly to another handset, is something that most people can master reasonably easily.

And herein lies the divergence, and, to me, the importance of FiWi. FiWi is Fibre ---> Wireless. (Many people forget that a mobile phone is a wireless device but for the purpose of this article, wireless also encompasses all the different uses of the wireless spectrum - wi-fi, Wimax (RIP?), GSM etc.)

A fat pipe is required for backhaul and the core network. There are no two ways about that, especially as our data transport requirements soar by the hour. If you cannot send enough packets through the network, consumers will moan. And rightly so. However, where the fat pipe reaches to only becomes an issue if the device and application(s) at the end of the first mile e.g. under the consumer's fingertips are using bloated code.

Mobile applications have necessarily used tight programming and compression techniques. Firstly, because of the internal memory limitations of the device, but also because the mobile network has limited capacity. The spectrum is a finite resource. You can't be letting people send 20 photos of granny's birthday party which are all 50MB, f'r instance.

But web applications have been developed with increasing amounts of memory eg in personal computers and servers, and increasing amounts of bandwidth available to the consumer to send or receive data. This has allowed web programmers to become 'lazy'. Why develop awesome compression techniques for videos if the connectivity a typical consumer has can handle what is already existent, and the likelihood is that this connectivity is only going to get fatter?

WAP was a much-maligned protocol but actually it was thinking along the right lines. People are going to use wireless to access the Net. More so now than ever before as the convergence becomes inherent in our thinking. iPads, iPods, smartphones and even your average £10 mobile handset can all access the Net. The idea that to do so would require you to plug in to any type of socket is now anathema to all of us.

Whether the wireless is in the first inch ie the wireless access point that spews wireless around your house or in the Bluetooth you use to share your photos, or the first mile ie to overcome technical difficulties with laying a fixed line solution, or even a satellite connection (which is also wireless), if you then connect this to fibre, you have the answer to the problem.

What problem? Oh, well, that'll be how to get fibre as close to every single human as possible.

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Next Gen Applications

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Read more! Considering the FTTH council Lisbon event was booked to be mainly about Next Gen apps, I feel a bit hard done by. This is not against the Council by any means. I think it reflects their lean to vendors rather than consumers, and that can be addressed.

However, not only was there nothing approaching next gen in the venue, most of the vendors are still missing that interconnect between their hardware, the fibre, and the apps those of us who are consumers want to use.

3D TV was 'nice' but then so is Project Natal. What else was on show? Home and business security. Telemedicine apps. E-education. Um. No, actually, none of those were noticeably there! But then it is not a consumer show.

The majority of apps that were on show are still in the talking stage. We hear that PT, ONsnet, Vasteras etc are doing consumer and commercial next gen apps ( >2Gbps etc), but there were very few demonstrations of them. I saw more next gen apps sitting in the Utopia Mobile NOC last month than in the FTTH Council conference but, once again, that's because that was about selling FTTH, not kit.

It seems to me that if you want to 'sell' FTTH, you must demonstrate it. So, the students and I joined a few dots and came up with some ideas to show next gen apps, which have since been extended during and after the colloquium on Friday.

If you have a next generation application, why not get in touch with me? If you have a valid use of FTTH, even if it is still on the drawing board, then I may have a chance for you to show it off at a global event.

Whatever you can envisage being done over high bandwidth, symmetrical bandwidth, FTTH, to consumers, patients, businesses, pupils, public sector - please let us know.





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(Mouse) Killer apps

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Read more! It has been a long time since I have seen an application that makes me think, "This could be the type of killer app that breaks the (copper) network and demonstrates that the so-called 'non-existent demand' for bandwidth is a fallacy", but I think I may just have found one.

I came across Youtube in its very early days and its use of video (high bandwidth reqs) and the symmetry of the app - I'll upload, you watch and vice versa, was the last such app. Nowadays, Youtube is a name everyone knows, but Mousehunt may not be.

I don't think MH in its current state threatens bandwidth caps or the core network. Any more than Youtube or Iplayer does yet really - I still can't watch a Youtube video or a BBC programme without jerks, buffering, and total frustration because of the poverty of the UK rural broadband network and the greed of its operators - but MH has all the ingredients to do so in the next 12 months or so if its developers keep to the successful recipe they have discovered.

MouseHunt is a Facebook application. Now before everyone switches off - you ignore social networks at your peril in business and government in 2008 - it is what it embodies that matters.

To explain though, MH is a simple online game. Basically, you build a mousetrap, buy some cheese and set off to the help the King of Gnawnia rid his kingdom of mice. As you catch more mice, you win points and gold, can upgrade your trap, buy different types of cheese, and move to different regions of the Kingdom, winning points to progress up through the levels of novice, apprentice, journeyman, master etc, which opens additional doors to new mice and hunting areas, and some horrendous puns, such as the Mousoleum - full of zombie mice, mummy mice, etc.

It is a waiting game though. You can only hunt mice every 15 minutes, and no more. It also takes time to achieve a new level of expertise - one week, two, depends on your skill and luck at catching mouses! So, to kill time, hunters loiter in the forums, run competitions to share gold, talk, help each other out, make friends to help them hunt more often, set up FB groups, and much more. The community that this has built is really quite staggering.

MH was launched in March/April this year, and after a mere 4 months, there are 10000+ hunters online at any one time. 39% of the people who run this application log on EVERY day. The forums are very busy, and with the developers encouraging suggestions of improvements and new ideas, you can watch a creative, engaged community at work for the greater good (politicans, civil servants and industry execs - take note. Grassroots activity is not to be sniffed at or ignored).

Additionally, it shows how a real-life community ought to work, (something we see far too little of these days) looking after each other, co-operating, and helping out others in a less fortunate position. I watched a scammer almost torn to pieces in the forums yesterday for ripping someone off for SuperBrie + the ultimate cheese. He returned it with a huge apology! There's people power /justice for you.

The inclusion of games within social networks is nothing new, but building a devastatingly simple yet addictive game which attracts a wide variety of different people, from around the world, who play as much for the social engagement as for the game itself, signals to me the rise of a new breed of app, and in this case, it could well be a killer. And not just of mice!

MH 2.0 is about to be launched, and it will be interesting to see whether anyone has seen the value of MH and decided to JV with Hitgrab. For instance adding video conferencing tools within it to allow hunters to communicate between their Hunt group - total strangers who help you hunt, who then become friends. (This time last week, I knew no-one in Louisiana but now I am concerned about several strangers and their families because of Gustav). Not just that, but there are Facebook groups dedicated to MH - for instance, the Non Violent Removal of Mice Charity (NVMRC), who want less deathly mousetraps, and others.

Tie in a Youtube application to MH and people will upload animations of mice (the graphics are superb, yet simple), vlogs and much more. Add video based clues to the game, and you start to see how 10k users at any time could start to munch through bandwidth. Especially if groups of them are also playing virtual musical chairs around their webcams to win 5000 gold pieces on the forums.

I think MH has the potential to be one of the first of a breed of online social networking games with mass appeal; that don't rely on gaming ability or obsession to get anywhere; and that need bandwidth thrown at the community of users. However, if the developers get ahead of the ability of their users to connect and engage, it will lose some of its appeal, as it will fragment the existing community between haves and have nots (just like the real world then!)

But it is precisely this type of app that highlights the need for decent bandwidth in the first mile. And underscores the failure by many to understand that users need bandwidth for fun, interactive stuff more than anything, whether that is retail therapy, uploading wedding videos, or playing games. How many e-gov websites can boast 10,000 simultaneous users? We (the consumers) really are not that interested in government stuff, however important politics may be in our daily lives, it is nowhere near as important as being part of an enthusiastic community of fellow mousehunters or sharing our funny clips from our mobile phones!

We vote for people to run the country so we don't need to worry about it; we expect the services our taxes pay for to work for us (ditto the civil service); and we want our government to protect us from self-serving commercial interests who otherwise dictate what we can and cannot do. And not just online. And then, we can do the interesting stuff that makes us the people we are.

If MH becomes the success it has the potential to achieve, we will see add-ons appearing with third parties benefiting from its success; a cross-app economy where players trade prizes from other apps for cheese etc (this is already happening); cheese traded for hard cash (as has been seen with gold farming in Second Life and many of the MMPOGs); and an increase in bandwidth usage by its players. Take note, you read it here first!

(Whilst writing this, courtesy of the help of my hunt group, which inclues an Open University lecturer, a marine biologist, and who knows what other occupations, I have caught a 1lb 3oz Bionic Mouse and several smaller brown and white mice - long live the King!)


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