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How Google wants to change networking.
Quagga might remind a little majority of people of an extint African zebra. However Quagga is also the name of an open source project that focuses on the future of networking. It is one of the projects that is being boosted by Google push for Open Source Networking. Google has joined hands with the Internet Systems Consortium to found Open Source Routing. Open Source Routing focuses on bringing Open Source solutions for Openflow, Software-defined networking and other technologies that are needed in today’s Webscale networking. Google also is pushing the ALTO protocol in order to improve quality of service for P2P and more importantly content delivery networks.
Google’s dream is to do the same with networking at it did with servers. Buy cheap commodity hardware and make resilient systems via software solutions. This strategy is directly in conflict with companies like Cisco or Juniper that focus on expensive proprietary hardware solutions. Google is trying to find cheap hardware in order to install Open vSwitch and other similar software on it.
Telecom operators and solution providers are wise to evaluate participating in the Open Source Routing effort. Verizon is one of the pioneers in trying out Openflow and the benefits it can have for carriers. Expect a lot of innovation from companies without a big brand to come in the coming months, examples could be bigswitch, fastly, pica8, etc.
Why is Europe no longer innovating?
A little test. Name a European dotcom that has changed people’s life in the last years? No clue? With only a minor change, substituting European for American and the list would be long: Google, Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Zynga, etc.
Even when innovations make it over the ocean, Europe is limited to doing business development, sales and some limited support. Look at the job pages of the big dotcoms and you will see the VP of Engineering in California and the business development manager in Europe. So the future is defined in California and Europe is just a market to sell the innovations that have been tried and certified in the USA.
Most people would not care less if Zynga would come from the USA or Tongo [No harm meant to anybody from Tongo]. However Europe is missing out on some major innovations that can boost the productivity of any small or medium enterprise. Think about Square, Quickbooks, Dwolla, etc. as examples.
Europe some years ago was leading the mobile and telecom industry with Ericsson, Vodafone, Telefonica, Orange, Deutsche Telekom and Nokia being clear examples. Nowadays it is Apple, Google, Facebook, etc. that lead the mobile and telecom revolution. Many might not realize it but Google has not only disrupted the mobile operating system market. Google has the first global software-defined network in the world. Google is writing history and being a major driver behind Openflow. Also the USA is leading together with Britain in White Spaces and other future wireless innovations.
What needs to change in Europe?
The European Union and local governments have always had a preference to over-protect the communication industry. Many laws protect former state-monopolies from getting real competition. The European Union should really look at White Spaces as a way to bring much-needed innovation back into the industry. Instead of selling the licenses to White Spaces to the usual suspects, the European Union should declare White Spaces as a “free” WiFi on Steroids alternative to LTE. White Spaces can be the solution for rural areas that want to get 21st century broadband connectivity.
Also the laws that oblige telecom companies to give national service are outdated. We do not have gigabit fiber-to-the-home in big cities because competitors are obliged to give universal service. Why not let 10 competitors fight without obligation to connect everybody? The free markets will connect those people and companies that are economically viable. By obliging universal connectivity, everybody is connected to a slow network. Leading to European broadband mediocrity.
Telecom companies that have started to set-up venture capitalist offerings are going the right way. Unfortunately too little money is poured into new ventures. Telefonica’s Wayra is offering $30-70K during a 6 months incubation. That means €46K to €109K on an annual basis as seed capital. What can you buy for this kind of money? Virtually nothing. Only one or two people teams at most. Great people would earn more money in their day job so they are unlikely to jump on Wayra. More realistic numbers would be €150-200K, which would allow teams of 3-10 people plus potential for hardware and other types of innovation. The chances that a 2 people team on a small budget makes a world-changing impact are very slim because you need multiple skills to really innovate.
Crowdfunding should also be high on the list of the European Union. Let people participate in ventures as very small minority stakeholders via collective seed investment. Give Europe some chance of building a European Kickstarter on steroids. Cross-European laws would need to be put in place for this.
We need European Entrepreneur Heroes as well. Europe needs a European version of Steve Jobs, Jeff Bezos, Larry Page, Mark Zuckerberg and Marc Benioff. People that can convert a vision into a multi-billion industry. People that will be role models for future generations.
If Europe wants to leave the current recession behind, it needs to think about moving away from farming subsidies into investing in innovation. We need modern digital laws and a general legal simplification to allow more entrepreneurs to start innovative companies. European corporations should set-up more venture capitalist funding and crowd funding should be high on everybody’s agenda.
Social Graph for Big Data just got a new Open-Source member: Giraph
The Big Data elephant just got a well-connected Giraff friend. Putting it differently, Yahoo and LinkedIn have open sourced scalable social graph software. If Hadoop was the Open Source version of the Google File System and HBase the Bigtable version, now it is time for an Open Source version of Google’s Pregel: Giraph.
In Open Source Social Graph Software Not Ready Yet I complained about the social graph not being ready. Giraph should change this.
So why is this important for operators?
Any service that wants to “be social” needs a social graph solution. A social graph links the Twitter followers, the LinkedIn colleagues, the Facebook friends, etc. For operators a mobile social graph can link callers. Who calls who, who influences who, who is going to churn with whom, who might also appreciate this marketing campaign, who should definitely know about this new service, etc.?
The “Hello World” example of Giraph is Google’s Pagerank. Pagerank is the power of Google search and now it is available to everybody that has millions of users. Be sure to keep an eye on this Giraph because the “Apache Zoo” just acquired a new important animal in its Big Data Analytics department…
Next Buzz: Social Enterprise Apps
Social Enterprise Apps are the next buzz. Companies like Salesforce with Chatter, Yammer, Jive, Google with Google+, etc. all want to change the way employees work in 2012 by adopting Facebook and Twitter-like solutions.
At the moment it is too early to tell who will be the winner. Most products however are still just offering only basic features like status messages, connect to colleagues, share documents, etc.
The real interesting features are still to come. Employee driven process creation and management should make it possible for plain humans (not über-programmers) to define and manage company processes and to transfer a world of Excel, Access and other homegrown solutions to the Web and mobile world.
Operators should jump on the social enterprise apps bandwagon because calls and SMS can still be incorporated into this new portfolio of products. However not in the traditional manner. Since everybody has access to a phone, it could be used for quick approvals either by calling in, getting called or sending an SMS. Even faxes could be incorporated. Traditional companies might be more willing to move from paper faxes to online faxes instead of moving from zero to Facebook speed right away.
The key will be the ability to people to define and manage things themselves without needing support from IT or five level of approvals…
Thinking differently about monetizing telecom services
Free, the disruptive French telecom operator and ISV, is changing the rules. Via Femtocell and via controlling the WiFi access points of its customers, Free is planning to offload a lot of mobile traffic via its fiber network. This is translated into very sharply priced mobile calling and data plans. Free’s Founder is telling the telecom industry they should no longer try to make money with communication but focus on identity and payment services.
Free is right to change the rules of the game instead of waiting for non-telecom disruptive players to do so. However what else could Free do to generate extra revenues?
Social Mobile Graph
Facebook is talking about social commerce in which friends, family and colleagues are taking an active role in your buying behaviour. At the moment social networks are either for business reasons, e.g. LinkedIn, or for pleasure, e.g. Facebook. However both need a lot of maintenance effort in which you need to send or accept invites from people who you might have known 20 years ago.
What if your calling and messaging behaviour could take away a lot of this burden? If you call somebody mostly during business hours then this person is likely to be a business contact, especially if other business contacts of yours have the same behaviour. Your addressbook and linkedin could be automatically updated. However you could go a lot further and see which restaurants your direct business contacts call more often. Anonymizing this information and creating public APIs and a marketplace for app developers could lead to a lot of innovative services that can be monetized.
Numbering Plan Apps
The numbering plan is probably one of the most under-used operator assets. However everybody knows how to dial a number. Why not let other people make new numbers, e.g. based on non-existing country codes or using the # or * combinations? People would be able to make premium services for everything from voting, surveys, competitions, money transfers, etc. Putting *120* in front of your number could mean that the caller is paying you 1,20 euros per minute to call you. It is up to you to redirect your number to an application that makes people want to call you. You might have a large numbering app market to choose from. Add a # and a number at the end and you could have thousands of applications behind one number. The operator would get a revenue share.
Call Center as a Service
Call centers are mainly used by large corporations. However small groups of ad-hoc people could benefit from them as well. Ad-hoc software support hot lines in which experts can be freelancers could be of interest to some. But it could even be as simple as housewives that can help you with recipes. As long as rating the participant’s value, dynamic joining and leaving of participants, paying participants a revenue share, configurable participant selection rules, etc. are provided, the applications are limitless.
A lot more
These are just ideas but there are a lot more possibilities that you can implemented. Especially if you can control both the mobile device as well as people’s access point. However the past has shown that trying to get a few people pay a lot of money for a service and operator’s trying to do it all by themselves, have not been successful. Innovation is not only needed in the product domain but also in the business domain. Models that should be explored are:
- Freemium, whereby most do not pay but get the traffic to your service and only a minority pay for advanced usage. Many examples in the web 2.0, e.g. LinkedIn, Zynga, etc.
- Long Tail, whereby not only a couple of high paying groups are targeted but instead thousands of niches are targeted via the use of a general platform or third-party eco-system, e.g. Google Adwords, Facebook Apps, etc.
- Revenue Share, whereby others get the bulk of the revenue because they take the risk and the operator gets a small share but gets it from a large group of revenue sharers, e.g. Apple’s App Store
Become your own mobile broadband operator
What if you had a gigabit Internet connection at home and you could connect a simple device to it and start to offer mobile broadband services without paying for the spectrum?
Four disruptive technologies and the support from a large disruptive player like Apple, Amazon or Google could make it possible in 2013. You could make money from instead of paying money for your fiber to the home connection.
Disruption 1: white spaces
FCC, the US telecom watchdog, is opening the US spectrum to unlicensed communications. The term is called white spaces. It basically means that unused spectrum can be used as long as you consult the FCC database and use an FCC approved device.
Disruption 2: Vanu
Vanu Bose is the son of the famous sound systems Bose. Vanu’s venture is about software-defined radio. It basically disconnects your mobile phone from the underlying radio technology.
Disruption 3: Openflow
I discussed Openflow before. It is one of the major standards for software defined networks.
Disruption 4: Cloud Computing
No further introduction necessary.
Bringing it all together
A white spaces compatible “mini base station” at your home that connects to the FCC database to get some local spectrum. Via the cloud and Openflow your nano operator network is linked to hundreds of other networks. A disruptive player offers Vanu enabled phones, e.g. iPhone 6 or Android Nexus Vanu as well as a monthly broadband subscription, e.g. €10 for 100gb. You download a database of “mini base stations”, their location and spectrum onto your phone. You are ready to go. Each time a phone connects to a “mini base station” a virtual network slice is setup (flowvisor / Openflow) and the owner receives money per Mb (nano payments). At the end of the month your Fiber to the Home subscription is paid for or you are even able to make money if you have enough traffic…
Europeans have lost their telecom edge…
Not so many years ago, Europe was the leader in telecom. Nokia was the dominant phone maker. Symbian the dominant operating system. GSM/GPRS/3G driven from within Europe. Ericsson the dominant network solution provider.
Fast forward 2011/2012
Only Ericsson is still leading the network solution market. Their mobile arm is being absorbed by Sony however. Symbian is dead. Nokia is in coma, let’s hope its doctor from the Microsoft hospital is able to revive them. LTE is being deployed widely, except for Europe.
The new rulers are Apple, Google and Huawei. Countries like South-Korea and Japan have gigabit fiber to the home. Something no European country can match.
What should Europe do?
First of all there is a legal problem in Europe that blocks a lot of innovations from reaching Europeans. Europe does not exist in telecom world. Instead there is a collection of small and medium countries that each have their own incumbant operator and legal framework.
The first thing should be to move the telecom legal framework to European level and stimulate the creation of one open market. It can not be that in Germany or France it is not possible to get a virtual phone number [DID] without having an address of residence. Services like Twilio have a hard time to deploy in Europe because of this.
The European Union should drastically reduce its help to farmers, especially industrial farming, and instead use the funds to build gigabit fiber-to-the-home. The UK model whereby the fixed infrastructure is separated from the go-to-market entities should be a good model to follow. If we want to have more Internet companies in Europe, we should start by having fast Internet in all mid to large cities. As well as LTE access for all Europeans in 2013.
European Silicon Valleys
The next step is to create European Silicon Valleys in which startups and universities get easy access to venture capital. Without European innovation, it is hard to see how the European telecom industry will blossom again. Large telecom operators have shown few success-stories when it comes to telecom innovation. They are better at buying successful startups, then starting new innovations themselves. But before you can buy, you must have them first.
The Alternative
What is the alternative of not doing anything?
European employment will suffer. Telecom hardware and software development will be moved permanently to China and India. With only some small design shops in Europe at best.
Operators will become bitpipes which means that only a fraction of the current employees are needed.
American dotcoms and large corporations will attract all investments.
If there ever was a time to feel European, now is the time…
