Fresh thinking
I have recently had the pleasure of attending a series of events hosted by eg.1, a business insight and talent company. I was introduced to them by Keith Willetts, Founder and Director of TM Forum, who co-hosted the initial event. I found their core insight both professionally interesting and personally valuable, so I would like to share it […]
I have some bad news: the published literature on ‘net neutrality’ fails to grasp the stochastic nature of broadband and its implications. This means that the relationship of traffic management to QoE is universally misunderstood and/or misrepresented.
Imagine a book on astronomy that didn’t mention planets, stars, galaxies, black holes, light or gravity. You’d find it a bit of an oddity, no? Well, that’s the situation we have in broadband policy: a body of literature that has collectively disconnected from the underlying physical reality.
Most of the articles I write are about general communications industry issues. For a change, I have put together a short description of the services that my company and my colleagues at Predictable Network Solutions Ltd (PNSol) jointly offer.
In the not too distant future, intelligent machines may join us in all of our voice conversations. The early steps towards re-imaging the phone call include technologies like call recording and speech recognition. The idea of hypervoice captures the maturing of this trend of computer-enriched voice communications.
A hot topic in telecoms at the moment is ‘software-defined networking’ (SDN). This term covers a range of technologies that put networks under the control of centralised management software. But what if SDN misses the point of why broadband networks exist in the first place?
For late May, the weather is unusually dull and overcast. But then again the year 2016 has been a dark one. You run your fingers back and forth over the grain of the hardwood boardroom table. A few tiny drops of your own sweat glisten in the grooves, reflecting back the fierce fluorescent lighting. The […]
“Philosophy is a battle against the bewitchment of our intelligence by means of our language.” – Ludwig Wittgenstein The words we use to describe telecoms networks often contain hidden metaphors and meanings that lead us into wrong thinking. Here are three examples.
Over the last few years I have come to appreciate how broadband networks are not widely understood, despite their ubiquity and importance. In particular, the relationship between a network’s basic operation and the resulting user experience is commonly misrepresented.
There is a media and regulatory battle on between T-Mobile USA and ‘net neutrality’ campaigners over the new Binge On service for video. In the absence of a market price mechanism for resources, there must be rationing. Binge On is merely an improved form of rationing compared to the status quo.
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