With its new converged messaging service announced today, Facebook took several more steps toward David Gelernter’s Lifestreams concept, first outlined in the mid- to late-1990s. See an old Yale web page on the topic, the newer Lifestream blog, and a 2009 interview with Gelernter. A lifestream is bascially a digital representation of your life — all the communications, documents, photos, blips, bleeps, and bits that come and go . . . arranged in chronological order as a never-ending river of searchable information. Google’s Gmail was the first popular application/service that hinted at the Lifestream ideal. Facebook — with its “seamless messaging,” “conversation history,” and “social inbox” — now moves further with the integration of email, text, IM, and attachments in never ending streams, accessible on any device.
Mobile traffic to grow 39x by 2014
Cisco’s latest Visual Networking Index, this one focusing mobile data traffic, projects 108% compound growth through 2014.
Digital Decade: The Pundits
See this fun and quite insightful discussion of the digital 2000’s (and beyond) with Esther Dyson, Jaron Lanier, and Paul Saffo (hat tip: Adam Thierer).
“HD”Tube: YouTube moves toward 1080p
YouTube is moving toward a 1080p Hi Def video capability, just as we long-predicted.
This video may be “1080p,” but the frame-rate is slow, and the video motion is thus not very smooth. George Ou estimates the bit-rate at 3.7 Mbps, which is not enough for real full-motion HD. But we’re moving quickly in that direction.
Two-year study finds fast changing Web
See our brief review of Arbor Networks’ new two-year study where they captured and analyzed 264 exabytes of Internet traffic. Highlights:
- Internet traffic growing at least 45% annually.
- Web video jumped to 52% of all Internet traffic from 42%.
- P2P, although still substantial, dropped more than any other application.
- Google, between 2007 and 2009, jumped from outside the top-ten global ISPs by traffic volume to the number 3 spot.
- Comcast jumped from outside the top-ten to number 6.
- Content delivery networks (CDNs) are now responsible for around 10% of global Internet traffic.
- This fast-changing ecosystem is not amenable to rigid rules imposed from a central authority, as would be the case under “net neutrality” regulation.
GigaTube
YouTube says it now serves up well over a billion videos a day — far more than previously thought.
Biting the handsets that connect the world
Over the July 4 weekend, relatives and friends kept asking me: Which mobile phone should I buy? There are so many choices.
I told them I love my iPhone, but all kinds of new devices from BlackBerries and Samsungs to Palm’s new Pre make strong showings, and the less well-known HTC, one of the biggest innovators of the last couple years, is churning out cool phones across the price-point and capability spectrum. Several days before, on Wednesday, July 1, I had made a mid-afternoon stop at the local Apple store. It was packed. A short line formed at the entrance where a salesperson was taking names on a clipboard. After 15 minutes of browsing, it was my turn to talk to a salesman, and I asked: “Why is the store so crowded? Some special event?”
“Nope,” he answered. “This is pretty normal for a Wednesday afternoon, especially since the iPhone 3G S release.”
So, to set the scene: The retail stores of Apple Inc., a company not even in the mobile phone business two short years ago, are jammed with people craving iPhones and other networked computing devices. And competing choices from a dozen other major mobile device companies are proliferating and leapfrogging each other technologically so fast as to give consumers headaches.
But amid this avalanche of innovative alternatives, we hear today that:
The Department of Justice has begun looking into whether large U.S. telecommunications companies such as AT&T Inc. and Verizon Communications Inc. are abusing the market power they have amassed in recent years . . . .
. . . The review is expected to cover all areas from land-line voice and broadband service to wireless.
One area that might be explored is whether big wireless carriers are hurting smaller rivals by locking up popular phones through exclusive agreements with handset makers. Lawmakers and regulators have raised questions about deals such as AT&T’s exclusive right to provide service for Apple Inc.’s iPhone in the U.S. . . .
The department also may review whether telecom carriers are unduly restricting the types of services other companies can offer on their networks . . . .
On what planet are these Justice Department lawyers living?
Most certainly not the planet where consumer wireless bandwidth rocketed by a factor of 542 (or 54,200%) over the last eight years. The chart below, taken from our new research, shows that by 2008, U.S. consumer wireless bandwidth — a good proxy for the power of the average citizen to communicate using mobile devices — grew to 325 terabits per second from just 600 gigabits per second in 2000. This 500-fold bandwidth expansion enabled true mobile computing, changed industries and cultures, and connected billions across the globe. Perhaps the biggest winners in this wireless boom were low-income Americans, and their counterparts worldwide, who gained access to the Internet’s riches for the first time.
Meanwhile, Sen. Herb Kohl of Wisconsin is egging on Justice and the FCC with a long letter full of complaints right out of the 1950s. He warns of consolidation and stagnation in the dynamic, splintering communications sector; of dangerous exclusive handset deals even as mobile computers are perhaps the world’s leading example of innovative diversity; and of rising prices as communications costs plummet.
Kohl cautioned in particular that text message prices are rising and could severely hurt wireless consumers. But this complaint does not square with the numbers: the top two U.S. mobile phone carriers now transmit more than 200 billion text messages per calendar quarter.
It’s clear: consumers love paid text messaging despite similar applications like email, Skype calling, and instant messaging (IM, or chat) that are mostly free. A couple weeks ago I was asking a family babysitter about the latest teenage trends in text messaging and mobile devices, and I noted that I’d just seen highlights on SportsCenter of the National Texting Championship. Yes, you heard right. A 15 year old girl from Iowa, who had only been texting for eight months, won the speed texting contest and a prize of $50,000. I told the babysitter that ESPN reported this young Iowan used a crazy sounding 14,000 texts per month. “Wow, that’s a lot,” the babysitter said. “I only do 8,000 a month.”
I laughed. Only eight thousand.
In any case, Sen. Kohl’s complaint of a supposed rise in per text message pricing from $.10 to $.20 is mostly irrelevant. Few people pay these per text prices. A quick scan of the latest plans of one carrier, AT&T, shows three offerings: 200 texts for $5.00; 1500 texts for $15.00; or unlimited texts for $20. These plans correspond to per text prices, respectively, of 2.5 cents, 1 cent, and, in the case of our 8,000 text teen, just .25 cents. Not anywhere close to 20 cents.
The criticism of exclusive handset deals — like the one between AT&T and Apple’s iPhone or Sprint and Palm’s new Pre — is bizarre. Apple wasn’t even in the mobile business two years ago. And after its Treo success several years ago, Palm, originally a maker of PDAs (remember those?), had fallen far behind. Remember, too, that RIM’s popular BlackBerry devices were, until recently, just email machines. Then there is Amazon, who created a whole new business and publishing model with its wireless Kindle book- and Web-reader that runs on the Sprint mobile network. These four companies made cooperative deals with service providers to help them launch risky products into an intensely competitive market with longtime global standouts like Nokia, Motorola, Samsung, LG, Sanyo, SonyEricsson, and others.
As The Wall Street Journal noted today:
More than 30 devices have been introduced to compete with the iPhone since its debut in 2007. The fact that one carrier has an exclusive has forced other companies to find partners and innovate. In response, the price of the iPhone has steadily fallen. The earliest iPhones cost more than $500; last month, Apple introduced a $99 model.
If this is a market malfunction, let’s have more of them. Isn’t Washington busy enough re-ordering the rest of the economy?
These new devices, with their high-resolution screens, fast processors, and substantial 3G mobile and Wi-Fi connections to the cloud have launched a new era in Web computing. The iPhone now boasts more than 50,000 applications, mostly written by third-party developers and downloadable in seconds. Far from closing off consumer choice, the mobile phone business has never been remotely as open, modular, and dynamic.
There is no reason why 260 million U.S. mobile customers should be blocked from this onslaught of innovation in a futile attempt to protect a few small wireless service providers who might not — at this very moment — have access to every new device in the world, but who will no doubt tomorrow be offering a range of similar devices that all far eclipse the most powerful and popular device from just a year or two ago.
— Bret Swanson
Jackson’s traffic spike
Om Malik surveys the Net traffic spike after Michael Jackson’s death:
Around 6:30 p.m. EST, Akamai’s Net Usage Index for News spiked all the way to 4,247,971 global visitors per minute vs. normal traffic of 2,000,000, a 112 percent gain.
Bandwidth Boom: Measuring Communications Capacity
See our new paper estimating the growth of consumer bandwidth – or our capacity to communicate – from 2000 to 2008. We found:
- a huge 5,400% increase in residential bandwidth;
- an astounding 54,200% boom in wireless bandwidth; and
- an almost 100-fold increase in total consumer bandwidth
U.S. consumer bandwidth at the end of 2008 totaled more than 717 terabits per second, yielding, on a per capita basis, almost 2.4 megabits per second of communications power.
Netflix and Web video
We’ve been talking about Netflix’s sure move to the Web for a long time now. In our presentations, we show how Netflix DVDs that today mostly arrive in the U.S. mail, if sent in high-def (HD) over the Net, would total almost eight exabytes per year. That’s almost half of all U.S. Internet traffic in 2008.
Well, here’s CEO Reed Hastings in Tuesday’s Wall Street Journal:
Netflix Inc. is a standout in the recession. The DVD-rental company added more subscribers than ever during the first three months of the year. Its stock has more than doubled since October.
But Netflix’s chief executive officer, Reed Hastings, thinks his core business is doomed. As soon as four years from now, he predicts, the business that generates most of Netflix’s revenue today will begin to decline, as DVDs delivered by mail steadily lose ground to movies sent straight over the Internet. So Mr. Hastings, who co-founded the company, is quickly trying to shift Netflix’s business — seeking to make more videos available online and cutting deals with electronics makers so consumers can play those movies on television sets.
His position offers a rare look at how a CEO manages a still-hot business as its time runs out. “Almost no companies succeed at what we’re doing,” he says.
“Code” at 10
Check out Cato Unbound’s symposium on Lawrence Lessig’s 1999 book Code and Other Laws of Cyberspace. Declan McCullagh leads off, with Harvard’s Jonathan Zittrain and my former colleague Adam Thierer next, and then a response from Lessig himself.
Here’s Thierer’s bottom line:
Luckily for us, Lessig’s lugubrious predictions proved largely unwarranted. Code has not become the great regulator of markets or enslaver of man; it has been a liberator of both. Indeed, the story of the past digital decade has been the exact opposite of the one Lessig envisioned in Code. Cyberspace has proven far more difficult to “control” or regulate than any of us ever imagined. More importantly, the volume and pace of technological innovation we have witnessed over the past decade has been nothing short of stunning.
Had there been anything to the Lessig’s “code-is-law” theory, AOL’s walled-garden model would still be the dominant web paradigm instead of search, social networking, blogs, and wikis. Instead, AOL — a company Lessig spent a great deal of time fretting over in Code — was forced to tear down those walls years ago in an effort to retain customers, and now Time Warner isspinning it off entirely. Not only are walled gardens dead, but just about every proprietary digital system is quickly cracked open and modified or challenged by open source and free-to-the-world Web 2.0 alternatives. How can this be the case if, as Lessig predicted, unregulated code creates a world of “perfect control”?
Getting the exapoint. Creating the future.
Lots of commentators continue to misinterpret the research I and others have done on Internet traffic and its interplay with network infrastructure investment and communications policy.
I think that new video applications require lots more bandwidth — and, equally or even more important, that more bandwidth drives creative new applications. Two sides of the innovation coin. And I think investment friendly policies are necessary both to encourage deployment of new wireline and wireless broadband and also boost innovative new applications and services for consumers and businesses.
But this article, as one of many examples, mis-summarizes my view. It uses scary words like “apocalypse,” “catastrophe,” and, well, “scare mongering,” to describe my optimistic anticipation of an exaflood of Internet innovations coming our way. I don’t think that
the world will simply run out of bandwidth and we’ll all be weeping over our clogged tubes.
Not unless we block the expansion of new network capacity and capability. (more…)
Climbing the knowledge automation ladder
Check out Stephen Wolfram’s new project called Alpha, which moves beyond searching for information on the Web and toward the integration of knowledge into more useful, higher level patterns. I find the prospect of offloading onto Stephen Wolfram lots of data mining and other drudgery immediately appealing for my own research and analysis work. Quicker research would yield more — and one might hope, better — analysis. One can imagine lots of hiccups in getting to a real product, but this video demo offers a fun and enticing beginning.
Bandwidth caps: One hundred and one distractions
When Cablevision of New York announced this week it would begin offering broadband Internet service of 101 megabits per second for $99 per month, lots of people took notice. Which was the point.
Maybe the 101-megabit product is a good experiment. Maybe it will be successful. Maybe not. One hundred megabits per second is a lot, given today’s applications (and especially given cable’s broadcast tree-and-branch shared network topology). A hundred megabits, for example, could accommodate more than five fully uncompressed high-definition TV channels, or 10+ compressed HD streams. It’s difficult to imagine too many households finding a way today to consume that much bandwidth. Tomorrow is another question. The bottom line is that in addition to making a statement, Cablevision is probably mostly targeting the small business market with this product.
Far more perplexing than Cablevision’s strategy, however, was the reaction from groups like the reflexively critical Free Press:
We are encouraged by Cablevision’s plan to set a new high-speed bar of service for the cable industry. . . . this is a long overdue step in the right direction.
Free Press usually blasts any decision whatever by any network or media company. But by praising the 101-megabit experiment, Free Press is acknowledging the perfect legitimacy of charging variable prices for variable products. Pay more, get more. Pay less, get more affordably the type of service that will meet your needs the vast majority of the time. (more…)
Net traffic update…
See two recent articles (here and here) addressing a topic I’ve done lots of research on: Internet traffic growth, mostly due to Web video, and the technology investment needed to both drive and accommodate it.
Here’s one of my papers:
Estimating the Exaflood – 01.28.08 – by Bret Swanson & George Gilder
Party like it’s 1999
My Tech Liberation Front colleague Adam Thierer notes a fun article by Harry McCracken that follows the top 15 Web entities from 1999, asking where they are today. Only six of the top 15 from 1999 remain so in 2009, with nine dropping off, and nine new names you may have heard of.
Bandwidth and QoS: Much ado about something
The supposed top finding of a new report commissioned by the British telecom regulator Ofcom is that we won’t need any QoS (quality of service) or traffic management to accommodate next generation video services, which are driving Internet traffic at consistently high annual growth rates of between 50% and 60%. TelecomTV One headlined, “Much ado about nothing: Internet CAN take video strain says UK study.”
But the content of the Analysys Mason (AM) study, entitled “Delivering High Quality Video Services Online,” does not support either (1) the media headline — “Much ado about nothing,” which implies next generation services and brisk traffic growth don’t require much in the way of new technology or new investment to accommodate them — or (2) its own “finding” that QoS and traffic management aren’t needed to deliver these next generation content and services.
For example, AM acknowledges in one of its five key findings in the Executive Summary:
innovative business models might be limited by regulation: if the ability to develop and deploy novel approaches was limited by new regulation, this might limit the potential for growth in online video services.
In fact, the very first key finding says:
A delay in the migration to 21CN-based bitstream products may have a negative impact on service providers that use current bitstream products, as growth in consumption of video services could be held back due to the prohibitive costs of backhaul capacity to support them on the legacy core network. We believe that the timely migration to 21CN will be important in enabling significant take-up of online video services at prices that are reasonable for consumers.
So very large investments in new technologies and platforms are needed, and new regulations that discourage this investment could delay crucial innovations on the edge. Sounds like much ado about something, something very big. (more…)
Web 3.0, ctd.
Three media veterans — Gordon Crovitz, Steve Brill, and Leo Hindery — give paid content, via micro-payments and related subscriptions, yet another shot. With iTunes and Amazon also doing their part to advance the model, will we finally get a break-through?
Web 3.0
Could the iPhone 3.0 release this summer help create the mechanism — and culture — of micro-payments that many have long been seeking to solve the Web’s intellectual property problem?
UPDATE: These guys were thinking the exact same thing.
“Innovation isn’t dead.”
See this fun interview with the energetic early Web innovator Marc Andreesen. Andreesen is on the Facebook board, has his own social networking company called Ning, and is just launching a new venture fund. He talks about Kindles, iPhones, social nets, the theory of cascading innovation, and says we should create new “virtual banks” to get past the financial crisis.
