Re: How Indian telcos are justifying violation of net neutrality

The best response to this pile of dung was written by David Isenberg 
back in 1997 and is titled, Rise of the Stupid Network.


Why the Intelligent Network was once a good idea,
but isn't anymore. One telephone company nerd's
odd perspective on the changing value proposition

by David Isenberg - isen-G05OuTKNJ/[email protected] - www.isen.com
INTRODUCTION: OBSOLETE ASSUMPTIONS & ENDURING MENTAL MODELS

Design-by-assumption works as long as assumptions hold. Assumptions are 
shortcuts to useful efficiencies, provided they are not violated. The 
classic telephone company value proposition, embodied in today's 
telephone network, holds:

     that expensive, scarce infrastructure can be shared to offer 
premium priced services,
     that talk - the human voice - generates most of the traffic,
     that circuit-switched calls are the "communications technologies" 
that matter, and
     that the telephone company is in control of its network.

Telephone companies still behave as if these assumptions hold despite:

     up to several thousand-fold declines in key infrastructure costs 
over the last two decades,
     a 20 year double-digit annual growth rate in the volume of data 
traffic, so that the volume of data traffic is now overtaking the (also 
growing, but more slowly) volume of voice traffic,
     the many different data types that now travel over the telephone 
network (despite the fact that the network is not optimized for all 
these data types),
     the many different types of "communications technologies," from 
television to Ethernet, that are not part of telephone network 
architecture, and
     the Internet, which, because it makes the details of network 
operation irrelevant, is shifting control to the end user.

The Intelligent Network is a straight-line extension of the four 
assumptions above - scarcity, voice, circuit switching, and control. Its 
primary design impetus was not customer service. Rather, the Intelligent 
Network was a telephone company attempt to engineer vendor independence, 
more automatic operation, and some "intelligent" new services into 
existing network architecture. However, even as it rolls out and 
matures, the Intelligent Network is being superseded by a Stupid Network,

     with nothing but dumb transport in the middle, and intelligent 
user-controlled endpoints,
     whose design is guided by plenty, not scarcity,
     where transport is guided by the needs of the data, not the design 
assumptions of the network.

The Stupid Network is not all here yet. It is in its infancy. It needs 
to get stronger and, well, a bit more coordinated.

Some telephone company people realize that things are changing, and must 
change. But they are hemmed in by conscious, deliberate, long 
established telephone company practices. Many are also hobbled by less 
conscious telephone company mental models of "communications," 
"technology," and "customer needs." While these people may realize that 
the old ways are becoming obsolete, they live in a world conditioned by 
an encompassing, arcane legacy that only remembers "rational," 
incremental change.

(Note: here "telephone company" refers to large companies whose main 
business is to provide circuit switched voice calling service. In the 
United States, most of these are the heirs of the Bell System legacy - 
but Sprint, MCI, GTE, SNET, and others might also try on this shoe, and 
if it fits...)

COMPUTERS AS SCARCE RESOURCES

It used to be more expensive to complete telephone calls than it is 
today. The operator-completed call gave way to call completion by 
electro-mechanical switch. Then, in the late 70s, the era of computer 
controlled electronic switching made placing calls even cheaper and more 
reliable.

In those days, computers, including those that controlled switching, 
were still considered expensive, scarce resources. When I worked in the 
nascent electronic toy industry in 1979, a single insight that 
eliminated six transistors paid my way. And the same factor - the need 
to save two expensive bytes of memory - laid the basis in this era for 
the Year 2000 Problem (stay tuned to the eleventh hour news for more on 
THIS story!).

Now computer circuits are thousands of times cheaper. Moore's Law is 
what we call the ongoing improvement in computing cost and power. But in 
the 70s it was not generally known to be a `law' - to most 
telecommunications engineers (and to humanity in general), it has become 
the most game-changing wild card played in recent times.

Telephone networks have been designed for optimal use of scarce 
resources. The local exchange in your city, which handles the last four 
digits of your telephone number, theoretically could handle up to 10,000 
telephones, e.g., with numbers 510-547-0000, 0001, 0002, et cetera 
through 510-547-9999. But the switching office is not designed to handle 
10,000 simultaneous calls. It is designed to handle far fewer, maybe one 
tenth of that, based on the assumption that even in the busiest time of 
the day, only a fraction of its telephones will be active at any one time.

The network works as long as engineering assumptions (e.g., the length 
of a call, the number of call attempts, etc.) do not change. But let the 
assumptions change episodically (e.g., Rolling Stones tickets go on 
sale), or structurally (calls to Internet service providers last several 
times longer than voice calls), and the network hits its design limits - 
completing a call becomes a matter of try, try again.

What if network design were based on another assumption - that 
computation and bandwidth were cheap and plentiful?

DOING "INTELLIGENT" THINGS WITH PHONE CALLS

Once the telephone companies began doing digital switching, the idea 
that you could do "intelligent" things with calls was not far behind. 
The concept of network control was extended to let various centralized 
resources - digital switches, databases (Service Control Points) and 
signal processing systems (Intelligent Peripherals) - communicate among 
each other by extending the telephone network's control protocol (SS7).

As noted above, the main force motivating the Intelligent Network was a 
telephone company attempt at "vendor independence" so telephone 
companies could get better deals from their suppliers. Thus, Intelligent 
Network specs were meant to encourage vendors to design their equipment 
to work in a multi-vendor environment - to interoperate. As a side 
benefit, almost an afterthought, some of the newly specified equipment 
could also interoperate with the business systems of certain customers - 
but only via limited, cautiously designed interfaces. Virtually all of 
these services center around call completion, automation, and billing. 
This, in a nutshell, is the concept marketed as the Intelligent Network. 
Some Intelligent Network service examples include:

     Routing calls to different numbers than the one that the caller 
originally dialed (this is the basis of e.g., 800 service).
     Giving caller choices before the call is completed ("push one for 
domestic reservations," etc.).
     Saying, "Calling Card, Collect, Third-Party, or Operator" to 
control payment options.
     Verifying that the calling card number is valid in "real time."
     Supplying calling party numbers directly to customers for database 
lookup (which is why I must verify from my home phone that I got my 
Citibank card in the mail).

Expensive computers, intertwined in central network operations, do this. 
Belief becomes reality. But wait! The telephone companies are now losing 
design hegemony - the news that "The Internet is here!" is beginning to 
penetrate the telephone company inner sanctum.

MEETING CUSTOMER NEEDS

The astute reader might by now suspect that the main beneficiaries of 
the Intelligent Network are the telephone companies themselves. 
Nevertheless, telephone companies propound a "philosophy" that the 
Intelligent Network makes it easy to introduce new services and new 
technologies, and to meet new customer needs.

New customer needs, when they are detected, filter into the telephone 
company slowly. Some needs, the ones with big, obvious, immediate 
payoffs, get attention from decision makers, who then request a business 
case, which must then get approved. The next step is the development 
plan, followed by the Operations, Administration, Maintenance, and 
Provisioning Plans. Then if all goes well, the telephone company might 
begin the process of implementation. This can take years, or even 
decades (witness ISDN).

If you hate hanging on hold, you are part of a huge latent market - do 
you know anybody who doesn't? Yet, telephone companies have yet to use 
Intelligent Network capabilities to effectively ameliorate this problem. 
Now, suppose Internet Telephony gets as good as telephone company 
telephony (see below), and some enterprising independent programmer 
wants to make a product that solves the problem of being on hold. They 
would simply write an end-user application and sell it from their web 
site. If it works, and people like it, they will sell lots of it. If 
not, they might try again. But they don't have to go through any long, 
bureaucratic economic justification, business planning, and technical 
development processes - they just do it. Internet Telephony, because the 
Internet Protocol works at the level that user software manages the 
session, takes the telephone company out of the value equation.

THE INTERNET DIS-INTERMEDIATES THE TELEPHONE NETWORK

The Internet breaks the telephone company model by passing control to 
the end user. It does this by taking the underlying network details out 
of the picture.

Let's look at how this works in the case of voice. To the telephone 
company, there is one main way of transmitting voice - sampled in 8 bit 
bytes, 8000 times a second, for an aggregate rate of 64 kbit/s. The 
entire telephone network is designed around this rate. But if you want 
to send voice on the Internet, you can encode it at any rate you want, 
and send it at any rate up to the one that the slowest underlying 
network link supports. The recipient must have the right decoder running 
in her intelligent terminal, too.

The very name, Internet, denotes that it is designed to network 
networks. You can use Internet Protocol on an Ethernet to communicate 
with an X.25 network, an FDDI network, or a modem - lower layer 
protocols are submerged, made irrelevant. So if you are on an (e.g., 
10Mbit/s) Ethernet, and your endpoint application wants to send better 
quality 256 kbit/s voice, no problem. You can't do that with the 
telephone network.

Or, with a different application (on the same endpoint and network) you 
can send six different interwoven 10 kbit/s voice streams to six 
different destinations at the same time. And you don't have to tell your 
Stupid Network provider anything about it, or pay a premium to install 
anything special. The network provider becomes virtually irrelevant - 
the user controls the relevant capabilities.

TRUE VOICE, FALSE START

I contrast the flexibility of a Stupid Network with my experience as a 
member of AT&T's True Voice technical team. AT&T True Voice was a 
valiant attempt to improve circuit switched voice quality as much as 
possible in the context of current network architecture. If we had not 
been constrained by network architecture, the easiest way would have 
been to increase the sampling rate or change the coding algorithm. But 
to actually do this, we would have had to change every piece of the 
telephone network except the wires. So we had to work within the 
designed 64 kbit/s data rate.

An astute AT&T perceptual psychophysicist (and a friend of mine) 
determined that voice quality could be substantially improved by 
boosting the bass part of the signal, that part of the audio spectrum 
between 100 and 300 cycles per second. But as we set out to implement 
this conceptually simple improvement, we kept running into the problem 
that there were too many places in the network that had built in 
"intelligent" assumptions about the voice signal - echo cancellers, 
conference bridges, voice messaging systems, etc. - and too many devices 
that depended on these acoustic assumptions for their correct operation 
- modems, fax machines, and a surprising number of strange devices with 
proprietary analog protocols. After about two years of intense effort, 
we made a noticeable difference, one that most listeners preferred (if 
asked explicitly), but it was not as large as it could have been. There 
was too much "intelligence" intertwined with the basic transport.

The True Voice experience led me to see the advantages of a network - a 
Stupid Network - that would let you stuff bits in one end and get them 
out the other without getting tangled up in cobwebs of legacy 
assumptions. Want a different voice quality? With a Stupid Network, 
you'd get a different program, install it in your intelligent end user 
device and run it.

A NETWORK ENGINEERED FOR USE

There is no longer first-order economic justification for a telephone 
company to engineer and control scarce, expensive, network resources - 
the basic conditions no longer obtain. The age of plentiful computing is 
here. I have a multi-color, three dimensional screen saver that uses the 
entire capacity of my 200 MHz Pentium. The designers of the Intelligent 
Network never imagined such "wasteful" use of processing "intelligence." 
The age of plentiful bandwidth is just around the corner, as several 
families of technologies (fiber, satellite, cable modems, xDSL, LMDS, 
and low power TV, to name just six) line up to break the local bandwidth 
bottleneck, and as the capacity of backbone fiber has risen from 2 to 6 
to 10, 20 and 40 Gbit/s over just the last few years.

The age of centralized control is ending too, with the rise of the next 
generation of Internet - and especially the appearance of circuit-like 
Internet mechanisms, such as those in the latest version of Internet 
Protocol (IPv6), designed to tame delay and improve real-time two-way 
Internet voice.

JUST DELIVER THE BITS, STUPID

A new network "philosophy and architecture," is replacing the vision of 
an Intelligent Network. The vision is one in which the public 
communications network would be engineered for "always-on" use, not 
intermittence and scarcity. It would be engineered for intelligence at 
the end-user's device, not in the network. And the network would be 
engineered simply to "Deliver the Bits, Stupid," not for fancy network 
routing or "smart" number translation.

Fundamentally, it would be a Stupid Network.

In the Stupid Network, the data would tell the network where it needs to 
go. (In contrast, in a circuit network, the network tells the data where 
to go.) In a Stupid Network, the data on it would be the boss.

Instead of fancy "intelligent" network routing translation, in a Stupid 
Network, intelligent end-user devices would be connected to one or more 
high speed access networks - always listening for relevant information, 
for data addressed to their owner. Sometimes a "communication" might be 
a few bits, perhaps a short, pager-type message. Other times, it might 
be longer, like email. In the event of the need for two-way voice 
communication, an initial message might state the identity of the 
"caller," and/or inquire of the whereabouts of the owner. The 
intelligent end-user device could apply its knowledge of where its 
"owner" was, and who the caller was. Then, if it were programmed to do 
so, it could launch a message to its owner, telling of the call, the 
caller's identity, location, and any other information. It could also 
forward as much information as practical.

End user devices would be free to behave flexibly because, in the Stupid 
Network the data is boss, bits are essentially free, and there is no 
assumption that the data is of a single data rate or data type.

IDIOT SAVANT BEHAVIORS FOR DIFFERENT DATA TYPES

In the current telephone network, voice is the assumed data type, unless 
specially ordered, high cost services are ordered. But in the Stupid 
Network, because the data is the boss, it can tell the network, in real 
time, what kind of service it needs. And the Stupid Network would have a 
small repertoire of idiot-savant behaviors to treat different data types 
appropriately. If the data identified itself as financial data, the 
Stupid Network would deliver it accurately, no matter how many 
milliseconds of delay the error checking would take. If the data were 
two-way voice or video, the Stupid Network would provide low delay, even 
at the price of an occasional flipped bit. If the data were 
entertainment audio or video, the Stupid Network would provide wider 
bandwidth, but would not necessarily give low delay or absolute 
accuracy. And if there were a need for unique transmission 
characteristics, the data would tell the Stupid Network in more detail 
how to treat it, and the Stupid Network would do what it was told.

The Stupid Network would let you send mixed data types at will - limited 
only by the knowledge and imagination of the application programmer 
community. One way voice messages, multi-way voice conferences, two-way 
video, email, documents, audio and/or video entertainment, whatever, 
could be mixed and interspersed at will, within and between sessions. 
You would not have to ask your Stupid Network provider for any special 
network modifications - its only function would be to, "Deliver the 
Bits, Stupid."

One thing about the Stupid Network is clear - the physical elements that 
comprise the network would be neither expensive nor scarce. There would 
be little profit margin in shipping dumb bits. There would be lots of 
high value Business Ideas supported by the Stupid Network, above and 
beyond transport.

LEADING INDICATORS

A rudimentary form of the Stupid Network - the Internet - is here today. 
The telephone companies are beginning to realize this. Fearing erosion 
of their control and, more importantly, their revenue stream, they have 
been quick to call for the banning of Internet Telephony, quick to call 
for the federal imposition of charges on Internet access, and slow to 
implement widely available, reasonably priced broadband services. This 
creates a chicken and egg problem - while the hungry wait for dinner and 
breakfast.

A powerful leading indicator of the Stupid Network will arrive when 
entrepreneurs who have no vested interest in maintaining telephone 
company assumptions begin to offer profitable, affordable, widely 
available data services. Watch Metricom's Ricochet modem service, an 
early entry in this market. Will entrepreneurial broadband service 
follow? There are several early efforts, for example, Sky Station 
International, which plans to launch self-propelled balloon-based 
transcievers over major cities to deliver personal 1.5 Mbit/s service. 
Meanwhile, we will see how advances in Internet Technology (such as IPv6 
and the Internet II initiative of leading universities) evolve - here 
the ability of the Internet to offer low delay services, such as two-way 
voice, is the key indicator.

To counter these threats, the telephone companies are now speeding 
deployment of Intelligent Network services, much like sailing merchants 
responded to the threat of steam by inventing faster sailing ships in 
the mid 1800s. The beneficiaries of this accelerated Intelligent Network 
deployment are big businesses - who can offer cheaper help-desk type 
services with lower human labor costs. Nevertheless, despite this 
current Intelligent Network buy-in, if big business finds that it is 
better served by the Stupid Network and premises based intelligence, it 
will not hesitate to switch.

The Telecom Act of 1996 and the World Trade Organization telecom 
agreement of 1997 can be seen as attempts to preserve oligopolistic 
hegemony of the telephone companies. The thrust of both is to allow big 
companies to band together to create a marketplace dominated by a few 
large players in place of government control. Will there be unintended 
consequences of these agreements? Count on it! Will they hasten or 
impede the advent of the Stupid Network? Hmmm.

THE STUPID NETWORK'S NEW VALUE PROPOSITION

The shift from scarcity to plenty is often the harbinger of new value 
propositions. For example, as computer power got cheaper and cheaper in 
the 1980s, there was much talk of a shift in value from hardware to 
software, but it was not easy to see how the shift would unfold. In 
fact, it appears that only one person (Bill Gates) understood it fully. 
The changes that now portend the Stupid Network are likely to shift the 
telecommunications value proposition from "network services" to 
something else. If I knew what it was, I would not be wasting my time 
writing these words.

Given that disclaimer, I have three brief observations:

     It is rare that a market is completely killed by the next 
generation of technology. Neither TV nor the VCR killed the movies. 
Neither the minicomputer (alas, remember them?) nor the PC killed the 
Mainframe. We still have ships and railroads, though their markets are 
both diminished and changed by the car and airplane. The "paperless 
office" exists - but mine is cluttered with books, memos and magazines 
that are printed on paper. So it is likely that the Stupid Network and 
the Intelligent Network will exist side by side for some time, or even 
share merged definitions, functions, and value. It is also likely that 
"deliver the bits" companies will exist in a Stupid Network world, but 
given much lower profit margins, they will not look much like telephone 
companies.

     Telephone companies themselves could cannibalize their own product. 
Smarter companies often field new products that replace current 
profitable product.

         Sony does this several times a year - it tries to learn from 
its own mistakes faster than its competition, fielding new products that 
improve on its old before such improvements become obvious to their foe.

         Boeing does it - the 757 and 767 cut into the top of its 727 
market and the bottom of its 747 market with fuel efficient, and crew 
efficient new designs - we can only hope that Boeing does not become 
complacent now that it is has beat out its strongest competitors.

         Intel does it - having been the first to articulate Moore's 
Law, it now drives it with a new, more powerful chip every 18 months or 
so, long before the old chip is obsolete - it realizes that if it stops, 
there are other chip makers that would be glad to take leadership of 
that market.

     Telephone companies could do it too, but it is unlikely as long as 
their senior managers prefer to talk with lawyers, regulators, 
consultants and financiers more than with experts in their own employ.

     Telephone companies could reinvent a place for themselves as 
purveyors of new values propositions brought by the Stupid Network. They 
will have to, because their old value proposition will erode as the 
Stupid Network grows. In a "deliver the bits" world, so much 
information, and so many courses of action, will be available, that 
there will be a great need for known, trusted authorities. Businesses 
with brand reputation and staying power will be guarantors of 
transactions, holders of critical information, organizers and filters of 
information, and even voices of reason, leadership, and "objectivity." 
(Of course, they will need to HAVE reason, leadership, and objectivity 
to do this.) There will be other roles for big companies in the world of 
the Stupid Network, and "forgetting organizations," who are able to 
abandon old models when new ways no longer support old assumptions, will 
find them.

THE CHOICE BETWEEN LIVING AND DYING

Former Shell Group Planning Head, Arie deGeus, in his master work, "The 
Living Company" (Harvard, Boston, 1997), examined thousands of companies 
to try to discover what it takes to adapt to changing conditions. He 
found that the life expectancy of the average company was only 40 years 
- this means that telephone company culture is in advanced old age. De 
Geus also studied 27 companies that had been able to survive over 100 
years. He concluded that managing for longevity - to maximize the 
chances that a company will adapt to changes in the business climate - 
is very different than managing for profit. For example, in the former, 
employees are part of a larger, cohesive whole, a work community. In the 
latter, employees are "resources" to be deployed or downsized as 
business dictates. As the Stupid Network arrives, as the business idea 
shifts from scarce physical infrastructure to something more knowledge 
based, company culture will need to adapt to the truth that, "Nobody 
knows as much as all of us."

Whatever we discover to be the new Stupid Network value proposition, my 
working hypothesis is that it will be based on intelligent end user 
devices, intelligent customers, employees whose intelligence is valued 
as a corporate asset, and companies that can learn.

Respectfully submitted,

Ken DiPietro
Cumberland MD



On 01/16/2015 09:49 AM, Nikhil Pahwa wrote:
>
>
>   http://www.medianama.com/2015/01/223-how-indian-telecom-operators-defend-their-attack-on-net-neutrality/
>
> From the IAMAI conference yesterday.
>
>
> _______________________________________________
> India-gii mailing list
> India-gii-IAPFreCvJWP2/[email protected]
> https://lists.india-gii.org/mailman/listinfo/india-gii

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