Economics of the Aethernet

I am usually a great fan of the Economist's Tech sections, as they so often have their fingers on the pulse and it's almost as well written as broadstuff ...

....but on reading this piece today I was left spluttering into my latte...its quite vague by their standards. Marc Andreessen has voiced some major concerns on this piece....I don't think it's that bad, and he is underplaying the bandwidth issue imho - but then he would, wouldn't he - see my notes below re who should actually pay.

Anyway, I wanted to pick up these key points as predictions of Points of Conflict going forward:

First, the impact of Rich Media and Poor Pirates....

Legal or otherwise, swapping multi-gigabyte high-definition video and movie files is becoming increasingly common.

In fact, it will soon be the norm. Television networks have found they can make more money from advertising while giving their show away for free over the internet than they can from broadcasting them. Now the movie studios are learning to do much the same.

And not just for TV - I pointed to a similar problem in the photo-images market following the Lane Hartwell/Richter Scale hoo-ha. We must expect to see advert based, and other offset based business models increasing on the net in 2008 and directly attacking all the rich media areas - this too will be a Big Thing

Secondly, who shall pay....

The result is a gridlock. That the telephone companies are running out of bandwidth can be seen from their equipment orders.

Cisco, the leading supplier of core routers used to direct traffic over the internet’s backbone, has just had another bumper quarter, with net income up 37% over the same period a year ago. Juniper Networks, another information-technology firm, did even better. Both companies credit the proliferation of social networks, the craze for internet searching, multimedia downloading, and the widespread adoption of P2P sharing for the surge in new business.

Yes and no.....yes the video traffic is increasing, but I cannot recall how many presentations I have sat in over the last few years talking about the bandwidth glut that was built in the Millenium Buggeration period.

What is more germane is that the battle about who will pay for switching on the bandwidth will become up close and personal in 2008, as the Telcos do feel that Service Co's make billions from "Free Ride" economics over their pipes with the emergent rich media services.

We can confidently predict that all the resultant issues - throttling, net neutrality etc etc - will not go away in 2008 either.

Thirdly, the emerging play for the Aether-'Net

Earlier this month, Google bid for the most desirable chunk (known as C-block) of the 700-megahertz wireless spectrum being auctioned off by the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) in late January 2008. The 700-megahertz frequencies used by channels 52 to 69 of analog television are being freed up by the switch to all-digital broadcasting in February 2009.

The frequencies concerned are among the world’s most valuable. They were used for broadcasting UHF television because they suffered little atmospheric absorption, could be beamed for miles, and could then penetrate all the nooks and crannies in buildings. Their relatively short wavelength makes the transmission equipment compact and the antennas small.

Mobile phone companies lust after the 700 megahertz frequencies because of their long range and broadband capabilities. They see lots of lucrative things like mobile television and other broadband services to offer customers.

But the 700 megahertz band is also the last great hope for a “third pipe” for internet access in America.

OK, Google hasn't actually bid yet...but its a sign of something else we pointed to that will start to be an issue going forward - ie that a lot of companies are looking at the Oligopolic and sadly Ossified Planet Mobile with covetous eyes, and see the auction of old analog TV spectrum as a chance to by-pass them - risk is is all we get are other different monopolists. And its not just the US, these are coming free in many countries over the next few years, UK included.

Personally I'm a convert to Lawrence Lessig's view that we should open these spectra to a managed commons, as that - like the Open FixedNet - has been shown to drive the best innovation over the last 10 years. The US seems far ahead of us in the UK in lobbying for this, sadly.

Fourth, the continued impact of Open Source:

Pundits agree: neither Microsoft nor Apple can compete at the new price points being plumbed by companies looking to cut costs. With open-source software maturing fast, Linux, OpenOffice, Firefox, MySQL, Evolution, Pidgin and some 23,000 other Linux applications available for free seem more than ready to fill that gap. By some reckonings, Linux fans will soon outnumber Macintosh addicts. Linus Torvalds should be rightly proud

Without doubt this will be a continuing impact in the back-end Infrastructure layers - I don't know about 2008 for the Presentation Layer (to consumers) though...Linux is still present in only a tiny number of consumer facing devices (as the BBC admitted to its cost judging by the wails of the Linoids)

Fifth, the true Millenium Bugs:

millions of gadgets are joining the human hordes. Any gizmo worth its silicon these days has its own internet connection—so it can update itself automatically, communicate autonomously with other digital species, and anticipate its user’s every whim.

This is a slow burn for 2008, but as Moore's Law brings prices down, this will be a very big play - work we did earlier this year in work on the Digital Home and Digital City projects showed that as staged price points whole ranges of devices will want to start having conversations with you. You think you're being nagged by Big Brother now, just wait till all these little buggers get online