Broadband Developments

Comcast putting a limit on usage 250GB just opened the door on the P2P business model. GigaOm (Om) who is an authority on this subject weights in. Om nails it by saying that in the short term it might not look good but it certainly raises question about what the future might look like. I agree with Om on this. Caps are bad and possibly foreclose the future innovation. Wait it’s a free market. The answer is P2P.

P2P is not hip today but this move by Comcast opens the door for the p2p business model. Why? The innovation in acceleration and performance has to come from new innovation in the transport. Comcast can’t deny p2p after this move. They have to let it “play” (pun intended). P2P is the only way the guys like Comcast can increase user experience while offering faster performance for both Live and On-Demand programming.

It’s also a red herring to allow Comcast (in the short term) to own HD quality programming. Here Comcast doesn’t care about the net and wants the HD side of it (see NBC playbook from the Olypics - HD trumps everything).

HD is the end game and the question is will Comcast keep the broadcast franchise or will the net technologies get there fast?

From Om Malik at GigaOm: He writes…

Comcast is out defending its bandwidth caps and how they are not bad. And how 250 GB transfer is plenty and enough to do whatever we want to do. Of course, in today’s terms that is more than enough, but what happens in the future? Nevertheless, if they are going to put caps, then they need to give us what I think is an acceptable expectation: a meter.

Metered billing needs a meter we can see, use and monitor any time we desire to do so. Water and electric utilities provide that meter (regardless of whether we use it or not), so why not Comcast?

If a customer surpasses 250 GB and is one of the top users of the service for a second time within a six-month timeframe, his or her service will be subject to termination for one year. After the one year period expires, the customer may resume service by subscribing to a service plan appropriate to his or her needs.

Figure out a way to tell us what our monthly usage is, and let us know if we are running up against a 250 GB cap, so that we know when to stop and not pay overage. I want to know at every single minute how much bandwidth I have used.

After all, if someone crosses the 250 GB twice in six months, they are going to get tossed out. The burden of proof lies with Comcast to prove, measure and meter to the most accurate byte of data transferred.

Another Question For Comcast: If you’re going to meter, then please let us know how you are factoring in the overhead associated with TCP/IP. Will this be included or excluded in the cap? After all, overhead includes control messages (session control, packet headers) and this can be as high as 40 percent.

This is where FCC Chairman Kevin Martin has to step up and do something. If he is going to allow Comcast to put caps in place, then the FCC needs a firm bond from Comcast saying that they wouldn’t lower the caps to, say, 150 GB or 100 GB using the same lame excuse of 1 percent people degrading the network.

You want to know why I think they are going to obfuscate the issue and fudge the numbers sooner or later using some Enron math? Just go to the FAQ page that explains their 250 GB cap decision. You will consume 250 GB in a month if you do any of the following:

* Sending 20,000 high-resolution photos,
* Sending 40 million emails;
* Downloading 50,000 songs; or
* Viewing 8,000 movie trailers.

…but then lower down on the same page, they say:

* Send 50 million emails (at 0.05 KB/email)
* Download 62,500 4 MB songs (at 4 MB/song)
* Download 125 standard-definition movies (at 2 GB/movie)
* Upload 25,000 hi-resolution digital photos (at 10 MB/photo)

What is it with you guys? Can’t do the math? Forget that…how about answering a simple question: How many HD movies can you download with 250 GB cap? That’s the only answer I need.

Olympic Numbers - Massive Live Broadcast on the Internet ?? Who’s the biggest in Live Concurrency?

To date I’ve been trying to find the record for most concurrent viewers of a “Live” event. NewTeeVee has a breakdown and detailed article on Internet usage on the Olympics 2008 in China.

Cisco helped setup the NBC system. Translation they provided the gear and expertise to make sure there were no screwups. I’m sure they overprovisioned the hell out of it. I wonder what the costs were? I wonder how much it cost? I wonder how much that provisioning investment delivered in terms of concurrent users traffic?

From NewTeeVee:

NBCOlympics.com served a total of 75.5 million streams during the games despite all the uproar about Silverlight, tape delays and a bad UI. The site clocked a total of 9.9 million hours of online video coverage. That’s impressive, even if NBC’s online video advertising revenue wasn’t, but there are plenty of other success stories all around the globe.

The BBC also had some major success with its web-based offering, serving almost 40 million streams until late last week, according to the BBC Internet blog. It had almost 200,000 concurrent viewers watching a total of 6.5 million hours of Olympic coverage - and those figures don’t even include the competitions held the final weekend, nor the closing ceremony. The BBC hasn’t published any numbers for its iPlayer yet either, but anecdotal evidence suggests that the video platform saw its traffic triple during the games. The broadcaster only served 2.5 million streams during the games in Athens four years ago.

Other European countries saw large numbers of online viewers as well. The European Broadcasting Union (EBU) estimates that a total of 18 million viewers tuned into streams from the games, and its member networks served a total of 180 million streams online. The BBC is a member of the EBU, which means that the Brits caused almost a fourth of all of Europe’s Olympic video streams.

China’s state television network CCTV saw even bigger numbers online. The network told the New York Times that more than 100 million people accessed Olympic video streams on its web site.

But CCTV’s site wasn’t the only way to watch the Olympics in China. The network also sub-licensed the online rights to P2P TV platforms like PPLive. The company told us that a total of 5.5 million viewers used its client to watch the opening ceremony, with 1.6 million concurrent users tuning in during the ceremony itself.

PPLive’s daily concurrent viewers during the Olympics. Image courtesy of PPLive.

PPLive saw similarly high numbers during the rest of the games, with daily peak concurrent viewers anywhere between 210,000 and 500,000 during regular competition days, and climbing up to 820,000 viewers for the closing ceremony.

PPLive’s cost? Almost nothing. Any company that can scale “Live Broadcast” at steady state 500,000 users spiking to 2m concurrent users impresses the hell out of me.

With Cisco’s acquisition of PostPath, they drop in another piece of the UC puzzle. The implications of this acquisition could be very interesting. Between Call Manager, WebEx and now PostPath Cisco has all the pieces of a UC solution, however they currently lack the integration. I’m assuming, of course, that Cisco plans an assault on the UC market with these pieces. I think it’s pretty obvious from this quote from Doug Dennerline at Cisco

“The acquisition of PostPath complements our strategy to develop an integrated collaboration platform designed for how we work today and into the future, providing real productivity gains and a more satisfying user experience.”

Hmmm, it sounds like a UC pitch to me. What makes it interesting is that they’re taking a cloud approach. Integrating cloud applications with the desktop and other enterprise applications has been a huge gap in cloud computing since its inception. How would you integrate an onsite CallManager deployment with WebEx in the cloud and PostPath potentially via either method? That’s the question Cisco needs to answer before they can present this conglomerate of tools as a UC solution.

They also lack a client piece. Where’s the Microsoft Office Communicator equivalent? My best guess is a web-based client like Microsoft’s CWA would be a likely route however again we hit the wall of Cisco’s lack of expertise in the end user software arena.

It’s a bold move but there’s a lot of work to be done for it to be a compelling unified communications offering.

So, Microsoft has just released a feature in their Internet Explorer 8 Beta 2 browser called “InPrivate” mode. The nickname is “Porn mode”. The browser can then hide the trail of sites visited. With one click all internet history is non-visible to webservers and other users. It includes options for turning off history and cookie collection. Most importantly the “InPrivate Blocking” feature also has the potential to block some advertisements.

And this has been more or less a feature of various other browsers out there, but never so prominent in what is still the dominant web browser, Internet Explorer. And those privacy activists must certainly be applauding this much needed feature, but there is something bigger afoot. What this does is it puts a significant hurdle for Google to work around. That history has been sold over and over again - your history used to deliver targeted content to your browser. That selling has been done by Google.

Figures vary, but what is clear is that short term market growth for internet advertising is expected to more than double to the 100 billion dollar mark. That despite growing focus on web development, public relations and database marketing. Google rules in this department. 99% of Google’s revenue is derived from its advertising programs (2008 Google report) Hit ‘em where it hurts…

On the topic of IE8, being a Firefox user myself for years now, I don’t see IE catching up anytime soon. I have used the IE betas, and they are not there yet. What is interesting and much appreciated going back to that first msdn blog is the attention to usability. The effort to get there is much appreciated.

So what will happen? Dusting off the old crystal ball here - let’s see.. I think Google will find a way around this to be honest..

Cisco announced today that it is buying PostPath for $215 million for the entire stock in PostPath. In the podcast by Cisco they tie WebEx collaboration and their Unified Communications story. Hmm - Collaboration and Unified Communications. Oh yeah Cisco throws in Web 2.0 in there. What is Unified Communications? Is it Web 2.0 or old school VoIP. From the Cisco announcement it looks like Unified Communications is shaping up to be Web 2.0 with a business model.

I’ve been saying that Web 2.0 is all about relationships - collaboration on the web is just that. This could be a great move for Cisco if they move fast to show benefits to users. Unfied Communications sector has been crippled lately because the benefits just aren’t being highlighted. The problems are compounded by the fact that no one can define Unified Communications.

From Cisco’s press release .. Building upon its commitment to provide a comprehensive collaboration portfolio, Cisco today announced its intent to acquire privately held PostPath, Inc., a provider of innovative email and calendaring software. Based in Mountain View, Calif. with additional development operations in Sofia, Bulgaria, PostPath will enhance the existing email and calendaring capabilities of Cisco’s WebEx Connect collaboration platform.

Here are the details on this announcement from Cisco’s Doug Dennerline blog - actually posted by PR. Doug is the SVP of Cisco’s Collaboration Software Group.

Doug writes on his blog … Communications, globalization and automation have flattened the world and transformed the competitive landscape. The traditional competitive advantages of size and scale have been replaced by speed and flexibility. In this new world, effective, adaptive collaboration is critical to achieving sustainable competitive advantage.

Today’s acquisition of PostPath is part of our commitment to create a comprehensive cloud-based collaboration platform. By offering an on-demand version of the PostPath solution, we can provide flexible, cost-effective email and calendaring integrated with our collaboration portfolio of Cisco Unified Communications, WebEx and Business Video.

PostPath’s Linux-based email, calendaring and collaboration solution is highly secure and scalable, and incorporates an innovative Web 2.0 architecture to meet the requirements of enterprise customers and small businesses. It’s interoperable with many different email solutions, offers an AJAX web client and is compatible with a broad range of mobile devices.

Sports teams are a leading indicator to consumer behavior.  Why?  Because they cater to a new generation of consumers who want the best in class amenities including technology.  Also because sports teams understand how to serve hese new users AND monetize them.    I wonder if the new Brooklyn Nets will do the same?

Matt Hamblem from Computerworld has a very interesting story on a UC success case.   What does this mean for broadcasting games “live”?  Having high speed networking at events are great but what this does is opens up a can of worms for UGC content.  Look for live streaming to come from fans in the seats.  Now that’s a paradigm shift.

The New York Mets will have new networking and unified communications systems in their new home, Citi Field, when they start playing baseball there next spring.

For Joe Milone, the organization’s senior director of information systems and technology, the first big test will come Friday, when the data center at the Mets’ Shea Stadium is moved to the 42,000-seat Citi Field, located in the outfield parking lot between Shea Stadium and 126th Street in Flushing, in the borough of Queens.

Milone sees the new stadium as an opportunity to build a multimillion-dollar network that will expand to include several unified communications applications and architectures from networking equipment vendor Nortel Networks.

“UC is a broad term, which I define as the ability to use technology for everybody on staff to communicate,” he said in a recent interview. In the case of Citi Field, it means that nearly 200 full-time employees will have the ability to easily tie teleconference bridges into the network and receive voice mails and faxes in their e-mail in-boxes, among other things.

Working with Nortel, Milone also will get access to the Microsoft Office Communications Server for deploying the conferencing bridge and an internal instant messaging function. He said the Mets hope to take advantage of “all kinds of OCS hooks” in the future.

“The features we’re getting are really broad,” Milone said. He’s also exploring whether to have desk phones extend to cell phones, so that a single call can move seamlessly between wired and wireless devices with the touch of a couple of keys.

In another example of UC convergence, all the digital game videos that are held in the SAN inside the new data center will be piped over the network using IP, meaning that historic game clips can be quickly posted on giant video screens for fans to see.

In addition, about half of the 70 call-center agents who will work in a new administration building connected to Citi Field will use phones running over IP in the network. Nortel’s design allows traditional circuit-switched calling alongside IP communications, so Milone has decided to keep the other half of the call center agents on traditional phone gear as a backup in the event of an IP network problem.

“Our call center is where we sell tickets, so it’s our bread and butter,” he noted.

The call center backup strategy is one reason Milone picked Nortel over several other major networking vendors, but another selling point was Nortel’s ability to provide switching fail-over in less than one second. If a switch fails, a backup will move video or IP phone calls to another switch, using an Ethernet backbone rated at 20Gbit/sec.

Milone also said it helped that Nortel could show that its networking gear uses less energy than that of major competitors, a factor that mattered to the Mets owners, who wanted to build an energy-efficient ballpark.

Citi Field will have as many as 250 Wi-Fi access points to support a range of functions, including wireless ticket-scanning and letting fans order food from their seats. The Wi-Fi gear from Nortel is not rated for the 802.11n draft standard but can be easily upgraded once the final standard is in place, Milone said.

“We’re trying to futureproof the network as much as possible in anticipation of all kinds of applications,” Milone said. “We think we’ve done a good job tackling that. We’re trying to make the best fan experience we can.”

Wes Durow, Nortel’s vice president of enterprise marketing, said Nortel has built a reputation for building networks inside sporting arenas. He estimated that Nortel gear has been used in half of the Major League Baseball parks that are either new or under renovation.

Nortel has also been chosen to provide network equipment for the upcoming 2010 Winter Olympic Games in Vancouver and the 2012 Summer Games in London.

The biggest threat to the promise of cloud computing to appear this summer wasn’t the failed trademark attempt by Dell, but rather brilliant research by a leading white hat security researcher. Dan Kaminsky discovered how a well-known and widespread vulnerability in DNS servers could be exploited in seconds and turn any one of millions of servers directing Internet traffic into a cybercrime gold mine in mere seconds.

Note: For those unfamiliar with cloud computing, or the delivery of software and other IT-related functionality as a service, you can read more at Archimedius. Some leading technology players involved or associated with cloud computing include: Google, Microsoft, Dell, VMware and Amazon.

As a result July and August saw unprecedented DNS media attention. Yet the discovery of a DNS exploit was only part of the story. Events soon unfolded that took the exploit from specialized security blogs (like Rational Survivability and Matasano, where the exploit leaked).

When the exploit inadvertently leaked (ahead of the disclosure timeline established to allow service providers ample time to patch their systems) the news quickly spread throughout more generalist blogs and even into mainstream media, including front page coverage in the NY Times referenced at Archimedius on July 31.

The Linux Journal published one of the best high level technical explanations of the exploit and why it matters. Despite the release of a patch and the heroic actions on the part of internet service providers, issues remain.

While the business press dwells on Dell, Microsoft, Google and a handful of key players making investments and strategic moves based on the eventuality of cloud computing, some of us in security and networking are all too aware of the storm clouds. You can read about the security issues at the newly established Infoblox DNS Security Center, with news, developments and resources hand-picked by leading experts.

Dan Kaminsky has openly labeled the patch just applied to protect the DNS vulnerability a temporary fix:

I listened to the Black Hat webcast today to grab as much info as I could on this subject. The biggest thing that I heard from the whole talk is that the patch fixes things to a reasonable point, but that long-term, there will have to be more work done to prevent the issue.

- Nathan McFeters, ZDNet

Unfortunately, it is likely that the DNS summer exploit story will fall back beneath the headlines in coming months; yet the vulnerability will still exist and it will likely require more patches on an ongoing basis. That will place an unprecedented level of demands on the management of the DNS infrastructure, the backbone of the Internet. That infrastructure is made up of millions of servers updated and managed manually. That is a serious problem.

An IDC report sponsored by Microsoft concluded that hardware costs were only a small fraction of the cost of operating a server (see page 5 for the IDC breakdown). Staffing expenses (management) and downtime constituted 75% of a server’s total cost of ownership, according to the April 2007 paper by Randy Perry and Al Gillen. More manual updates will impact both management and availability, the leading cost components before the DNS exploit discovery.

Internet integrity is a critical requirement for cloud computing. It requires a very high level of trust to use an online application for commercial and even personal uses. More management and availability challenges will further increase the cost of internet integrity while introducing new risks. The DNS exploit and the recognition that the recent patch is only a short term measure suggests that internet integrity may be more at risk than ever.

There’s More

A few days ago I discovered this YouTube piece by Cisco promoting green data centers and couldn’t help but to take notice of the points made about other server costs, including power. Cloud computing could suck up huge amounts of energy if cloudplexes are not virtualized properly and managed efficiently. For all of the opportunities posed by cloud computing it is obvious that substantial technical burdens remain before servers will follow the moon In pursuit of cheap electricity.

While low cost electricity and VMotion are important requirements for cloud computing, Internet integrity is the table stake: few will trust IT services from an unknown source. That is why the rise of cloud computing will depend upon the continued success and evolution of utility-grade core network services. Without network integrity the economics of software as a service will always be limited to low value consumers using low value services.

You can read my disclaimer at: About ARCHIMEDIUS.

Love the ad from EA Sports - enjoy

Webware has the blog post story on Microsoft’s Phtosynth. Also the Microsoft Live Labs is post on Photosynth - collaboration project out of their Labs. Photosynth was a born of a collaboration between Microsoft and the University of Washington, based on the groundbreaking research of Noah Snavely (UW), Steve Seitz (UW),and Richard Szeliski (Microsoft Research).  This is what Microsoft need to keep doing get these projects to Microsoft Live.

Photosynth can assemble three-dimensional scene compositions of rooms or landscapes by detecting similarities in photographs, adding perspective based on the camera’s vantage point.

While Microsoft is excited about the technology, it says that Photosynth is available as a preview release of sorts, adding that there are many features and platforms it has yet to support.

Microsoft has always pumped money into R&D. Every big company has R&D but what they do with it is telling. With this announcement it shows that Microsoft is not afraid to put new stuff out fast. I like that. I remember when I worked at HP the HP labs had a ton of great stuff but executive management was afraid to let their people run with projects in the market. In fact HP coinvented the Web - that’s a bit of trivia that not alot of people know about. HP dismissed the Internet in 94-95 even thought an HP Labs computer scientist coinvented the web (HTML) with Tim Berners Lee. I hung out with the the W3C when they moved to Cambridge in 1995. HP Labs missed the boat on taking advantage that their R&D money went into making the web happen.

Go Microsoft show us some of the other stuff you have working.

Gene Upshaw, president of the National Football League Players Association, has died from complications of pancreatic cancer. He was the longest-tenured labor leader in professional sports, having been director of the NFLPA since 1983. He was also the only player to appear in the Super Bowl in three different decades — the 60s, the 70s and the 80s — as a Hall of Fame offensive lineman with the Oakland Raiders.

Upshaw was one of the most powerful figures in sports, presiding over the players’ union during a tenure that spanned three NFL commissioners. He helped secure free agency for players, and he kept the union solidified during a strike in 1987. During his tenure, salaries increased enormously, and the union was able to win a larger share of the league’s revenue for players.

Uphaw was vacationing in Lake Tahoe with his family when he died, NFL Network reported.

Upshaw, through his involvement with the NFLPA as a player and as executive director, played a major role in the collective bargaining agreements of 1977, 1982 and 1993, as well as extensions of the CBA in 1998, 2002 and 2006.

Upshaw had vowed to remain head of the players union through the next collective bargaining agreement, despite some players feeling that it was time for a change in leadership. It is unclear who will fill the huge leadership void left by Upshaw’s death.