Ambient Connectivity – How 19th century business policies keep us from communicating

Our communications are stuck in the 1800s – in the era of the telegraph – says Bob Frankston, whose writings can be found on http://frankston.com/public/

In Thinking outside the pipe
(http://frankston.com/public/?n=ThinkingOutsideThePipe)

Frankston argues that just like we provide roads for everyone to travel on, we should provide the pipes that our bits can travel on, without charging at every passage. Toll roads have given way to public roads that can simply be used, why has the same not been done for our communications infrastructure?

Why must our information highways (to use an old cliché) be restricted to narrow paths? The answer lies in history going back to way 19th century telegraphy business.

We think in terms of railroads with our messages being treated as freight to be carried to a distant destination just like they did when the telegraph wires ran along the railroad tracks. And because bits are invisible, we can imagine they act like trains of packets running on phone wires.

We need to free ourselves from the past and recognize that the Internet is based on a very different concept.

To understand this we can look at the packets, or containers, we use to ship goods across the oceans. They can be loaded on boats without the ship owner knowing what is inside. The containers can take any path across the ocean – they aren’t restricted to channels and you can even use airplanes.

Freed from the limitations of pipes and the need to buy services from carriers the market can work its magic. By owning our infrastructure (as a community) we can choose how to serve our own needs and priorities.

Instead of having pipe providers, communities would hire people and companies to help facilitate the movement of packets. Unlike providers who need to restrict capacity so they can collect rent on wires, we can embrace the abundance by funding our common infrastructure. Wires and radios are synergistic rather than competing technologies.

Unlike today’s telecom industry which requires a vast governmental regulatory system, an infrastructure approach gives us a true marketplace for companies seeking to provide gear and maintain the flow of bits. To understand this in more detail read about the Internet as Infrastructure.

Understanding Ambient Connectivity
(http://frankston.com/public/?n=AmbientConnectivity)

is a longer paper that lays out a new way of organizing connectivity as infrastructure, rather than relying on service providers to give us – and charge us for – bits and pieces of what should be the roads our information travels on. I recommend reading the whole paper, but if you lack the time for that, here are some excerpts.

Something is very wrong – 21st century connectivity has run smack dab into the needs of 19th century telegraphy. It’s not just the hundreds of billions of dollars that go to pay for services that no longer make sense, like phone calls. The problem is that we’re being limited in our very ability to communicate.

Our rights of way were given to these carriers based on the 19th century notion that communications policy was like railroad policy. And even though we know that that is no longer true we cannot get back the free speech rights guaranteed us in the US Constitution.

We’re also facing a legal system whose definition of antitrust doesn’t seem to have the concept that technology changes. The problem we have is not market share. The problem is control of a “value” chain and divvying up the marketplace among competitors firmly wedged in the 19th century. They use their control to prevent 21st century innovations. They can and do place a price hurdle on innovation. This is prior restraint and we cannot afford to be prisoners of ignorance.

Ambient Connectivity gives us access to the oceans of copper, fiber and radios that surround us. Ambient Connectivity is a framework for addressing applications needs. The term “connectivity” subsumes “communications” and extends the concept to include “relationships” between pieces of information.

Telecommunications is a service industry. We pay companies for services like telegrams and TV. They maintain their own infrastructure in order to support these services. This worked very well in the 1800’s.

And at first glance it seems to work well today. Once you’ve paid for your broadband connection you no longer need to think about the costs of using the Internet. Today you also have the option of a 3G data plan.

The problem with this model is that the Internet needs an ample supply of raw bits so we can create our own solutions. You can think of a bit as being like a kernel of corn. If farmers grow too much corn the price drops below cost. This is why we pay farmers to not grow corn in order to limit the supply.

This is why so much of the infrastructure we already have goes fallow. The telecom industry owns the facilities and limits availability of the bits so they are able to force us to buy their services. Cable TV operators use almost all the capacity of their infrastructure for their own services and give us only about one percent for “Internet”.

The free market solution is simple – align incentives so people and companies can act in their own self-interest.

This seems like an ideal solution in which everyone wins. Instead of requiring scarcity we can find the abundance in what we already have. This is exactly what has happened with Moore’s Law style hypergrowth for decades.

We don’t need to manage all the details once the dynamics of the market are in tune with creating value. We can start very simple – using the existing infrastructure and protocols with a different funding model.

A city would typically hire companies to maintain and install infrastructure. It would award the contracts to those who can do the best job for the least cost.

A first step might be to “light up” the existing copper wires using technology which adapts to the wires as they are. Without the need to channel the bits into billable paths, all of the existing access points would be opened up to provide wireless coverage.

Connecting Information – Our focus on networks in themselves has diverted our attention from actually using information. We see this when we lose a hundred million dollars space probe because we confuse metric numbers with English (meters vs. yards). We need to connect information not just exchange bits.

This is a new frontier. Today even something as simple as synchronizing one’s own address book across devices is problematic.

We should be putting in more effort to enable the use of computing and networks rather than simply focusing on the transport of bits. Those efforts have been counter-productive by forcing the bits into billable channels.

Imagine if we start to use the abundant information.

There is much more, and if you can do it at all and are interested, go read the original at

http://frankston.com/public/?n=AmbientConnectivity

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