Ged Carroll

Category: telecoms | 電信 | 통신 | テレコム

I thought about telecoms as a way to talk about communications networks that were not wireless. These networks could be traditional POTS (plain old telecoms systems), packet switched networks including ethernet or some hybrid of the two.

I started my agency career working during the dot com era. What was happening in the broader technology space was one wave of technology cresting, while another one rose.

In the cresting space was:

Enterprise software (supply chain software, financial systems, database software, middleware software tools).

NIC cards (network interface cards, a way of getting your computer to be able to communicate with an ethernet network. It was a little circuit board that connected on to the mother board and allowed.

Mainframe and  mini-computers. It was around about this time that company owned data centres peaked.

In the rising wave was:

Servers –

  1. Unix servers and workstation grade computers were what hosted the first generation of websites. Names that did particularly well were Sun Microsystems (now part of Oracle) and Silicon Graphics Inc. (SGI). Sun Microsystems ran everything from investment banking models to telecoms billing systems. It’s hardware and software made great web servers. SGI was facing a crisis in its core market of 3D modelling due to Moore’s Law, but its operating systems was still very powerful. They managed to get some work as servers because people had them around in creative agencies.
  2. You also had a new range of servers on the low end. A mix of new suppliers like Cobalt Networks and VA Linux, together with existing companies like Dell who were offering Linux and Windows web servers that were really repackaged local area network file servers.

Enterprise information management software. The web posted its own problems for content management and publishing and companies like Captiva and Open Text rushed in to plug the gap.

Traditional vendors like HP and IBM rushed into provide a mix of software and hardware based solutions including e-business by IBM, which morphed into ‘Smarter Planet’

Telecoms companies – two things happened.

  1. Phone services were deregulated opening up former state owned incumbents to competition in fixed line and mobile telephony
  2. Data services really started to take off. Multinational companies like Shell looked to have a global data network for routing their calls over, so in many respects they looked like their own telecoms company. Then those data networks started to become of interest to the nascent internet providers as well. Mobile data started to gain traction around about the time of the dot com bust

So it made sense that I started to think about telecoms in a wide but wired sense, as it even impacts wireless as a backhaul infrastructure. Whether this is wi-fi into your home router or a 5G wireless network connecting to a fibre optic core network.

  • On smart watches, I’ve decided to take the plunge

    I have long thought on smart watches as a possible useful device. So I have decided to take the plunge into wearables. My previous attempt with the Nike Fuelband didn’t go very well as I seemed to break them with frightening regularity and never really learned much from the experience apart from Nike can’t build hardware.

    I haven’t gone with Samsung wrist watch, or the better looking Sony one. I will not be rocking a pre-release device from Apple. Instead I have relied on smart watches pioneer Casio, who gave us the Data Bank in the 1980s.
    blue G-shock
    Casio has built a low power Bluetooth module into a G-Shock that gets up to two years on a lithium battery and is still water resistant to 200 metres. Realistically I would be happy if I got 12 months out of it. It uses its Bluetooth skills to give you basic notifications around email, incoming calls and alerts across Facebook, Twitter and Weibo.

    At the mid-point in the price of G-Shock watches, it means that the upgrade path isn’t exactly painful. The G-Shock strikes the right balance between robust hardware and disposability required for technology improvements.  In fact, I’ve worn a G-Shock before when travelling to span timezones and as a timepiece that I won’t get too attached to if it gets stolen – the smart watch G-Shock has the advantage of my phone being on view less often, ideal for the crime-filled streets of Shepherds Bush or Shenzhen.

    I think the smartest thing about the watch is it’s deliberately limited scope to provide notifications. I don’t think that Casio has it perfect, in fact I can see how the power-saving function on the Bluetooth module is likely to miss messages; but I think that they are on to something with this approach – and so I am willing to give it a try.

    I am surprised that these watches aren’t being sold in Apple stores around the world given G-Shock’s brand presence in the street wear community. Maybe Casio hasn’t got their act together, or Apple aren’t particularly keen on the competition.

    Oh and I won’t look-or-feel like a complete dick wearing it.

    More information

    “Generation 2 Engine” Bluetooth® v4.0 Enabled G-SHOCK | Casio – yes their marketing sucks with a naming structure only a Microsoft product manager could love
    Comparison Chart of Mobile Link Functions – Casio

  • Nokia E90 Communicator

    The last time I was excited about anything coming out of the World Mobile Congress was 2007 with the launch of the Nokia E90. That year the World Mobile Congress  was held in early February 2007, some four months before the launch of the first iPhone. At that time, Nokia was king of the world, their beautifully made hardware was made with magnesium alloy chassis’ on the E-series business handsets. Symbian was a user friendly if flakey operating system.
    Nokia e90 and 6085
    It took business smartphones to the next level with the Nokia E90 Communicator; a powerful handset with a full sized keyboard hidden beneath the exterior of a candy-bar phone.
    Nokia e90 and 6085
    The Nokia E90 was a leap forward from the previous 9X00-series communicators in computing power and connectivity. The E90 supported Bluetooth, Wi-Fi, numerous bands of GSM, UMTS cellular radio and HSDPA – which heralded a near broadband web experience – network permitting. Beyond connectivity, the phone sported a decent-sized screen some 800 pixels wide, a full keyboard that I managed to type blog posts on in real-time and a GPS unit that allowed you to tag photos on Flickr or use Google Maps.

    There was also a built-in camera that was ideal for use with Skype when you had a wi-fi connection. Setting up an IMAP email account was a doodle. And unlike one of the current crop of phablets I could fold the clamshell case and put in the side pocket of my carpenter jeans. I used the E90 Communicator as a lightweight laptop replacement, similar to the way I currently use the MacBook Air.

    The achilles heel of the E90 Communicator was the Symbian software. I had some 3,500 contacts at the time in my computer, when I attempted to synch it across to my phone it bricked. I had to have it reflashed. It was not a memory issue, but that the OS seemed unable to handle a business contact book. I managed with a sub-set of the contacts on there. Eventually while in Hong Kong on business, the phone stopped holding a charge, it would chew through a battery in 30 minutes. I got a replacement battery for it but it made no difference. Given that mine was a developer programme model phone, no one in Shenzhen would attempt to repair the device.
    Nokia E90
    The sticker in the back of the phone was like kryptonite for the most hardened shanzhai hardware hacker.

  • Oris Aquis depth gauge + more things

    Oris Aquis dive watch with built-in depth gauge

    IWC Aquatimer Deep 3 vs ORIS Aquis – Gear Patrol – Oris’ approach to its depth gauge on its Aquis dive watch is a really elegant design solution. In the Oris Aquis there are are no moving parts, or complex surfaces to waterproof. Instead the Oris Aquis relies on Boyles law and the different refractive index between glass, air and water to form a meniscus. You might worry about dust getting into the depth gauge of the Oris Aquis, but the risk is relatively low and would be likely to be cleaned out by water action. More related content here.

    Consumer behaviour

    China’s Growing Gray Market for All That’s Foreign – haitao – searching abroad

    Number of Cars Per Household Stagnates in Japan | WSJ – peak car in Japan (paywall)

    More Than a Third of Americans Have No Retirement Savings | TIME – shocking and astonishing

    Marketing

    BlueFocus Hires Holly Zheng To Oversee International Expansion | Holmes Report – Because the industry landscape is changing, people are looking for more integrated solutions. We want to be a solutions company — a one-stop shop when it comes to digital.

    Tumblr to start searching images for brand info | PR Daily EU – interesting use of image recognition

    Media

    Orange Bear | Facebook for Business – is it just me or is anyone else trying to see the business case / causality in this case study? It looks like a press release with bursts of numerical tourettes

    Online

    Giving You More Reasons to Share on SlideShare – explains why they weren’t taking premium subscriptions

    Google Made 890 Improvements To Search Over The Past Year | Searchengineland – competitive advantage right there in the headline

    Twitter now officially says your timeline is more than just tweets from people you follow – Quartz – interesting changes

    Google Is Planning to Offer Accounts to Kids Under 13 – WSJ – interesting restrictions and opportunities for marketers willing to play ball

    Telegraph “Forgets” Its Own Stories Documenting Google “Right To Be Forgotten” Removals | Marketingland – something recursive in the nature of this and straight from the pages of Franz Kafta

    Security

    Researchers find it’s terrifyingly easy to hack traffic lights | Ars Technica – no real surprise

    Technology

    Sales of wearables set to rocket despite current ‘chaotic’ stage of development | Marketing Week – nothing particularly insightful

    Are processors pushing up against the limits of physics? | Ars Technica – the struggle to extract greater parallelism from code. Even low-end smartphones now have multiple cores, but we’ve still not figured out how to use them well in many cases.

    A portable router that conceals your Internet traffic | Ars Technica – inexpensive pocket-sized “travel router”

    A brief history of USB, what it replaced, and what has failed to replace it | Ars Technica – I found an ADB (Apple Desktop Bus) connector keyboard at the weekend

    VCs suck (but there’s a way you could prove me wrong) | Fortune – issues in data transparency

    Email Is Still the Best Thing on the Internet – Atlantic Mobile – one of the nicest pieces I have read in a while. Lastly other forms of communications are harder to search or keep a record of.

    Wireless

    Lenovo becomes China’s top smartphone supplier: IDC – interesting that Lenovo managed to get a jump on the likes of Xiaomi and Huawei

    The simple reason smartphones are getting bigger | Quartz – APAC market preferences dictating global move

  • Ooredoo Myanmar + more things

    Ooredoo

    Ooredoo heralds commercial launch in Myanmar | TotalTelecom – interesting how Facebook was used to engage Burmese early adopters and potential retail partners. Ooredoo is an international mobile network operator headquartered in Qatar. Ooredoo has presence in Algeria, Indonesia, Iraq, Kuwait, Myanmar, Maldives, Oman, Palestine, Qatar, and Tunisia. (Disclosure: I worked on the pre-launch activity for Telenor Myanmar, a rival of Ooredoo)

    Consumer behaviour

    YouTube generation V research – males 18 – 34 years old. Self-serving but useful (PDF)

    FMCG

    Colgate’s Unseen FDA Pages Flag Concerns Over Triclosan – Bloomberg – Triclosan looking controversial. (Disclosure: I worked on Colgate China and Malaysia business). More FMCG related content here.

    Gaming

    Sands China sets first-half record | SCMP – interesting how this US gaming outfit has improved despite an overall cooling in gambling

    Media

    Facebook PMD Sprinklr’s Newest Acquisition: TBG Digital – finally someone bought TBG, they’d been shopped around long enough

    Security

    Meet MonsterMind, the NSA Bot That Could Wage Cyberwar Autonomously | WIRED – what happens if it gets spoofed and attacks an innocent third-party?

    London cops cuff 20-year-old man for unblocking blocked websites • The Register – the case law around this could be interesting

    Technology

    Sony Says 10 Million PlayStation 4 Game Consoles Have Been Sold Worldwide – that is a tremendous leap forward for PlayStation, I hope that they can keep up this momentum

    Cor blimey: Virgin Media pipes 152Mb fibre to 100,000 East Londoners • The Register – The company has suffered a number of DNS outages recently and refuses to let either the media or its customers know just what the problem is

    Why Robots Aren’t the Bellhops of the Future | Motherboard – If you happen to have a rich person handy, ask them: luxury is an interaction with the world, not a thing. I certainly don’t say this as a rich person

    Wireless

    China vs. Qualcomm: Chip’s ‘Nationality’ Still Matters | EE Times – would prefer a bit more balance in the editorial but still interesting article

  • Digital China

    I was looking for data on Digital China. wearesocial put together some of the best slideware together in terms of macro-dgital numbers country-by-country.

    Slides and numbers only tell some of the story, so I wanted to reflect on some of the data points in the slides.

    • China boasts a mobile penetration of 91%, however many people have two or more phones which means that mobile phones aren’t quite as ubiquitous as the number appears
    • Desktop internet usage still occurs in internet cafes, often inside a factory complex like Foxconn’s facility in Shenzhen or off the high street of major cities where gaming is a popular pastime, this puts a slightly different complexion on the European-looking numbers for Shanghai and Beijing
    • One thing that is noticeable about Chinese broadband internet connections is that whilst they have bandwidth (which averages just over 3.45MB/s according to the slides), it also has a lot of latency – due to the systems put in for local legal and regulatory compliance. Latency is important because even a small amount (just 0.025s) can adversely affect the call quality on a voice over IP call
    • Mobile internet is very popular, partly because it is the only internet access that a lot of people have. The popularity has come at a price for mobile operators including infrastructure costs (so they have banded together to build a joint network of base stations) and reduced SMS traffic (WeChat’s rise has reduced SMS to just 2% of its former value)
    • QQ has 808,000,000 accounts, at least some of these are actually business accounts. A Chinese business operating on e-commerce will have a QQ IM account for synchronous communications and file transfers, alongside an email address (which will get checked less frequently) and a phone number
    • The search market statistics quoted show user promiscuity in their search habits, partly due to the fact Baidu had taken a more measured approach to mobile search
    • The e-commerce numbers fail to show the market dominance of Alibaba with its TaoBao and TMall retail platforms as digital China shops. TaoBao alone has half a billion registered users, the vast majority of which would be in China
    • WeChat has some 600M domestic registered users. Again some of these accounts will be corporate accounts, there are many inactive accounts if these numbers are to be believed. Each account will be attached to a mobile phone number

    More China related content here.