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Open Economies - FW: David Isenberg on Trans-Pacific Tour, part one -- SMART Letter #80 [Date Prev][Date Next][Thread Prev][Thread Next][Date Index][Thread Index] FW: David Isenberg on Trans-Pacific Tour, part one -- SMART Letter #80
Dear Friends, Below is a copy of my absolute favorite technology newsletter. Read the wonderful up-to-the-minute section on Japan and consumer technology use. Kids rule! Get a sense of where our local world could go if we had cheaper, more ubiquotous telecom services.... David Isenberg is funny, edgy, courageous, wizardly--and an honest reporter. He also tends to be right more often than not about the technology future. He is a former Bell Labs scientist who gained fame years ago for haranguing AT&T early and loudly about the coming demise of its "intelligent network" in favor of the "dumb network"--read, Internet. Happy holidays! Jim -----Original Message----- From: David S. Isenberg [mailto:isen@isen.com] Sent: Friday, December 20, 2002 6:41 PM To: jmoore@cyber.law.harvard.edu Subject: Trans-Pacific Tour, part one -- SMART Letter #80 To: jmoore@cyber.law.harvard.edu !@#$%^&*()!@#$%^&*()!@#$%^&*()!@#$%^&*()!@#$%^&*()!@#$%^&*() ------------------------------------------------------------ SMART Letter #80 -- December 20, 2002 Copyright 2002 by David S. Isenberg isen.com - "no incarceration without representation" isen@isen.com -- http://isen.com/ -- 1-888-isen-com ------------------------------------------------------------ !@#$%^&*()!@#$%^&*()!@#$%^&*()!@#$%^&*()!@#$%^&*()!@#$%^&*() CONTENTS > Soapbox: Let's find a new name for 'anti-globalization' > The isen.com Trans-Pacific Tour, part one + Japan + How Japanese kids and U.S. kids connect + What ever happened to India? + Australia > Quote of Note: Doc Searls, "Nice doing business to you." > Quote of Note: Despair.com on customer disservice > If it's funny, it must be true, by Scatt Oddams > Conference on my Calendar > Copyright Notice, Administrivia ------- SOAPBOX: LET'S FIND A NEW NAME FOR 'ANTI-GLOBALIZATION' by David S. Isenberg I'm distressed that huge multinational corporations have given globalization a bad name. Notwithstanding, people who oppose tyrannosauric actions of big companies ought to stop calling themselves "anti-globalization." Globalization itself is a fact. There are more ways to be globalized than there are to be American; some of them are wise, human and life-affirming, while others are toxic, taxic, imperialistic and exploitative. Most of the time it is easy to tell which is which. We share a small, beautiful planet "Anti-globalization" sounds so head-in-the-sand. C'mon people. You're not against cheap, easy, international air travel or instantaneous international, communications are you? If you're SMART you're not against treating our planet as a single complex system. I hope you're not anti-roundness or anti-blue or anti-anybody-but- your-own-tribe. Let's find a better descriptor! ------- THE isen.com TRANS-PACIFIC TOUR by David S. Isenberg isen.com is a one-person multinational thanks to the Internet -- without the Internet it would be almost impossible to do what I do without a staff. Since I do not make enough money to support a staff, I couldn't do it. So, thanks to the Internet I've enjoyed business and pleasure over the last few weeks in Japan, Australia, New Zealand and (that oh-so-different culture) California. This SMART Letter covers the first half of the trip -- my visit to New Zealand and my write-up of the Supernova conference will be in SMART Letter #81. You don't have to travel or have an e-pen-pal halfway around the world to think globally. The next time you're watching the sun "rise," remember that you're on a planet that is rotating towards the sun on its axis as you watch it. When I really think about it while I'm watching, it changes my perception of the event; it feels like I am rotating out of the planet's own shadow, there is no "rising" involved. JAPAN Japan is definitely rotating towards the sun these days, in connectivity if not overall economy. When I visited Japan two years ago, it was pathetically behind the United States, except in mobile services. Techies lamented the paper-insulated, World War II era copper loop plant and NTT's parochialism. Now, suddenly, Japan seems (to this globalized gaijin) to have its act together. Japanese ADSL service is priced right. In September 2002 there were over five million "broadband" (mostly ADSL) subscribers, and take rates are accelerating. YahooBB, the largest, most aggressive ADSL provider, offers 12 Mbit/s connectivity at about US$12.00 a month. Mandatory Yahoo ISP subscription costs another US$12.00. YahooBB is sparing no expense to Get Big Fast. There are bouncy TV commercials. Attractive teens in YahooBB uniforms hand out free starter kits (ADSL modem plus software) on the streets, in the subway, in shopping malls to anybody who will take one. YahooBB, in business since September 2001, blew past the million-subscriber mark months ago. (When I imagine YahooBB's customer acquisition costs, I cringe, but since YahooBB is controlled by Softbank, they *must* have a plan, right?) For another US$3.00 a month YahooBB also offers unmetered Internet-to-Internet VOIP telephone calls, and (in a country with non-trivial per-minute local charges) dramatically reduced Internet-to-landline calling prices. There's an RJ-11 jack on the back of the YahooBB ADSL modem; just plug in your phone and call. (I did not get to hear a YahooBB Internet telephone call firsthand.) For another US$10.00 per month, YahooBB customers can use 802.11 hotspots in McDonalds, Starbucks, Denny's and other public and semi-public spaces. To date, there are only about 3000 hot spots nationwide, but this number is growing. (It will be fun to see how businesses respond when spaces designed for fast customer turn-around become places where kids spend hours lingering over laptops.) There's not much cable TV in Japan, so cable modem service has no base. But there are other large ADSL providers besides YahooBB/Softbank (e.g., NTT), and Fiber to the Home (FTTH) is a reality in more than a few Tokyo neighborhoods. In November, the seven next-largest ISPs announced plans for an Internet telephony service for their 2 million broadband customers to compete against the YahooBB service. They say their calls will travel over a dedicated network. Bad idea! FTTH deployment is still in its infancy in both Japan and the U.S. Today FTTH serves over 100,000 Japanese homes, versus a few tens of thousands in the United States -- and Japan has less than half the people of the U.S. Like Japanese ADSL service, FTTH in Japan is priced right. 100- megabit symmetrical service costs less than US$50.00 a month from Usen (including ISP service). Or, where fiber serves an apartment building, 10-megabit service (via in- building Cat-5 wire) is priced similarly to ADSL. FTTH availability is spotty and according to neighborhood, but it is expanding fast. I have never connected to the Internet in more ways than I did in Japan. I dialed in, of course; I could hear the crocodile going tick, tick, tick, so always-on was out of the question. One of the hotels I used had always-on Ethernet service for about US$10.00 a day, another charged about US$15.00; these were absolutely plug-n-play. (Or, more accurately, plug, reboot and play.) When I visited my brother Daniel's company (http:// www triangletech.com) I plugged into his company's fiber-based Ethernet service seamlessly. I also connected via 802.11b at GLOCOM's "Socio-Economic Impacts of Wireless" conference that hosted my visit to Japan. (You can see the entire conference at http://tinyurl.com/3nam). But perhaps the most interesting connection was supplied by Japan Communications, Inc. (http://tinyurl.com/3n76). It was wireless and ran at up to 128 kbit/s. OK, so it didn't set any speed records, but it did allow me a persistent, un-metered, always-on anywhere connection that Tokyo local telephone calling did not. This was important, if for no other reason than to maintain instant messaging reachability for people back in the United States. Japan Communications is a virtual provider, a networkless networking company. It buys connectivity from a private, licensed network in the 1900 MHz band and re-sells it. It supplies a PCMCIA card and some simple software, including drivers and various compression engines to make the 128 kbit/s experience faster to the user. Japan Communications' specialty is selling connectivity to the corporate marketplace, so, e.g., salespeople can reach into rapidly changing databases at headquarters. Meanwhile, Westport Communications, a re-re-seller of Japan Communications' product (http://tinyurl.com/3q2o), provides individuals, including visitors to Japan like myself, with a rent-a-connection for about US$80.00 a month. My experience was that it worked well during non-business hours, but slowed significantly as people came to work. Japan Communications founder Frank Seiji Sanda (who I knew from a previous visit and who serves on my brother's advisory board) explained that during work hours his corporate customers get priority. He strongly suggested I use the compression engines, but I am philosophically opposed -- best effort *should* be good enough. However, I suspect that if I were in Japan for any length of time (a) I would have to become a customer and (b) I *would* use the compression. HOW JAPANESE AND U.S. KIDS CONNECT Howard Rheingold's new book, _Smart Mobs_ largely revolves around how kids in developed nations use mobile connectivity, and how it changes their lives. I read most of _Smart Mobs_ on the plane to Japan. When I got to Japan, I could've fallen under the spell of the Jet Lag Monster, but instead I took my cue from _Smart Mobs_ and hopped a subway to Shibuya to see the mythical Japanese young people in action. There they were, just as Rheingold described, jamming the electronics stores and sushi bars, thumbing their keitai (mobile phone), getting a funny joke via text and passing the phone around to their friends, capturing a picture of their girlfriend's ring on their cell phone and emailing it from their seat on the subway. Why, I asked several people, did Japanese kids glom onto mobile devices more than U.S. kids. The answer that emerged speaks to me more of cultural differences than of technology or connectivity. After school, U.S. kids go home, shut their bedroom door and log on. In contrast, Japanese kids hop a train and go downtown, keitai in hand. In Japan it is safe to be a teenager of either sex anywhere; in the United States parents fear for their kids when they're out. Also in the United States distances are long, roads are wide and gasoline is cheap, but in Japan driving is difficult and expensive; the large freeways through the middle of Tokyo are mostly two-lane and jammed. Meanwhile trains are everywhere; young Japanese teens are as mobile as everybody else. In addition, Japanese living space is small and not very private, hence it is not as likely that kids will have a PC set up in their bedroom; they probably don't have their own bedroom or even their own desk. Before Comcast split my old New Jersey neighborhood's cable Internet access, performance would sag right around 3:30 PM on school days. So I know that U.S. kids are as techy- connected as anybody. But they're in their rooms, not out meeting their friends because Soccer-Mom would have to drive them -- yet another example where the mere act of asking permission itself becomes a barrier. Meanwhile, Japanese kids are out face-to-facing even as they connect to the net. The latter sure seems healthier. Especially if you believe the experts (like Susan Stucky, see http://tinyurl.com/3ncz) who say that the deepest learning comes from direct social interaction among peers. U.S. kids probably have a richer on-line experience with a big screen, a full keyboard, printers and speakers. I wonder if Japanese kids will stay home more as they acquire higher-speed connectivity. But mostly I wonder how a nation of shut-in and mommy-driven kids will evolve compared to a nation where kids are autonomously mobile and more socially interactive. WHAT EVER HAPPENED TO INDIA? For almost a year Bharti Telecom, India's second carrier, has been sending me feelers through third parties about visiting them. Bharti was on the trans-Pacific tour until the Fail Fast Letter (see http://netparadox.com) hit the Internet. The very next day the folks at Bharti decided to "postpone" the isen.com visit. (If it thinks it's a telco and acts like a telco and avoids dissenting views like a telco . . .) I'm not sure which business unit at Bharti was inviting me. I'm not sure if they knew who they were inviting or what I stand for. They wanted me to do "promotional," but I only do promotional if I like what I see. They weren't ready for isen.com. In contrast, when I criticized Cisco directly (in SMART Letter #72, http://isen.com/archives/020611), concerned senior Cisco folks invited me to come tell them more, because they wanted to understand (on the off chance that I *might* be right). NTT (Japan) is trying hard to understand the consequences of the Stupid Network too. And if Bharti ever decides it wants to hear what I have to say, that'll be a sign of hope. Then I'll be glad to go tell them and listen to them, and we'll probably have a good discussion. AUSTRALIA The flight from Tokyo to Melbourne was about the same duration as the flight from San Jose to Tokyo, but it was less disruptive because Tokyo time is only two hours different than Melbourne time. Body time stayed in synch with planet time. Both Australia and New Zealand, having dabbled briefly in telecom competition, are slipping back towards duopoly. In Australia, Telstra is the former monopoly and Telecom New Zealand has an interest in the #2 carrier. In New Zealand it is vice versa. One person I talked to thought that the non-dominant carrier in one country cribbed the press releases from the other non-dominant carrier on the other side of the Tasman Sea. Tweedle dee on one side is tweedle-dum on the other. And vice versa. "Well, they're living in a happy harmony Tweedle-dee Dum and Tweedle-dee Dee They're one day older and a dollar short They've got a parade permit and a police escort" Bob Dylan, "Tweedle Dee & Tweedle Dum," in _Love and Theft_, 2001. International long distance is still showing signs of strong competition in Australia. I bought an AU$10.00 prepaid card from the local tobacco shop to follow up on some business in Japan. I had a nice long leisurely chat, maybe 45 minutes or an hour. The voice quality was fine, and the explicit dialing directions on the card more than compensated for having to dial over 30 digits. After Japan, I called the United States, and the announcement said that I had AU$7.82 (about US$4.50) left on the card and therefore the call could only last four hundred and some minutes. So distance really is dead in Australia if you use the right stethoscope. In contrast, the cheapest U.S. calls from New Zealand that I could find cost NZ$0.16 per minute (8 U.S. cents). Not bad, but it seems that the N.Z. economy must bear an infrastructure cost that the Australian economy does not. Another contrast: the hotel's Ethernet connection cost AU$29.95, about US$17.00, significantly more than Japan. But it was still worth it. My host in Melbourne was the Australian Telecommunications Cooperative Research Centre http://www.atcrc.com. Nice folks, but old school. They were reeling because Ericsson had just announced they were closing their Australia-based research lab. After my talk, Leith Campbell, the head of ATCRC, invited a couple of Australian telecom/IT folks. One of them, Ric Clark, the managing director of the Ericsson lab that was closing, wasn't much fun because he agreed with me completely. The other, Robert G. James was feisty. He talked confidently, as if neo-new-economy business models were already in place that would let publishers get their cut, banks get theirs, and would even let the telcos get theirs. In my interpretation of his view, nobody gets disintermediated; all the entities remain intact despite the technical and architectural disruptions of the Stupid Network (which he agreed were coming). Well, I guess it is one scenario -- one that publishers and banks and telcos would probably pay good money to hear. The next morning I was in the elevator in my hotel when the door opened and a young man bounded in. He crackled with energy. "G'day," I proffered. He replied, "What do you do?" I reply with a sweeping gesture of my arms, "Telecommunications." His energy level went from high to intense. "Really?" he says. "I'm building a new network for rural Sri Lanka from scratch. Everything -- land line, mobile, Internet. I have $xxx million committed and I'm here looking for partners. I'm flying to Europe tomorrow. Do you want me to send you the documents?" As he says this last word, his hands indicate a stack half a meter high. "No, I told him, feeling a little afraid, "but I would *love* to see your executive summary. I bet I could help." There are no coincidences. To date he and I have exchanged a couple of brief emails, but I have not yet seen the executive summary. Clearly the man is busy! But given the opportunity to dive in, I am willing to try to show him that IP over dumb fiber will beat the telco stuff he's getting from the major vendors and 'sultants in performance and price. Stay tuned . . . The cab driver who took me to the airport provided another memorable encounter. When I got into the cab, he asked me how I wanted to go to the airport. I looked at my watch and suggested the scenic route. He was in his sixties, I guess. He was born in Iraq, neither Muslim, nor Kurd, but a Christian. He had lived in the Ukraine, in some other former Soviet republic, in Egypt, in Singapore, and he had recently moved to Melbourne and achieved Australian residency. He had a Ph.D. in food microbiology, and he was delighted to meet another Bio Ph.D. I asked him about the threatened U.S. invasion of the country of his birth. His answer did not have a cliché or habitual thought in it. He talked about how the powerful use power and about how people let themselves be oppressed. Mostly he talked of his own experiences. He would interrupt himself to show me the sights -- here a hospital, there a park -- and to ask me about the United States. He had no idea about U.S. racism; his eyes widened when I told him that dark skinned people in the U.S. had higher infant mortality, longer prison sentences, lower incomes and shorter lives. I assured him that most people in the U.S. thought that this was not a good situation, and that it was still a great country, and that even with racism there was tremendous opportunity for immigrants. He smiled. But he thought he would stay in Australia. At the airport, I stepped out of the cab onto the surface of the Earth with more awareness than when I had stepped into the cab. A consulting firm I used to work with at AT&T -- GBN -- calls its affiliated clever consultants and powerful pundits "remarkable people" after Gurdjieff's book, _Meetings with Remarkable Men_ . Gurdjieff's remarkable men were avatars in the original sense, embodiments of divine consciousness sent to Earth for a purpose. The cab driver would not have fit the GBN profile, but I think he might have fit Gurdjieff's. [Next: "My amazing day in Wellington, New Zealand," and "Supernova, the most blogged conference ever," in SMART Letter #81, available soon on computer screens everywhere.] ------- QUOTE OF NOTE: Doc Searls "[There's a problem with acronyms like] B2B, B2C and so on. 'To' is the wrong preposition . . . the correct middle letter should have been W, because in a real marketplace we do business with people not to them. Does anybody ever shake hands and say 'Nice doing business to you!'?" Doc Searls, quoted in boingboing.net, 21 Nov 2002 ------- QUOTE OF NOTE: Despair, Inc. [Despair.com does a send-up of "success-ories" -- those kitschy motivational posters titled, e.g., Teamwork, Let's All Pull Together. You've seen them down at HR and in the Salesman of the Month's office. I ordered the Despair 2003 calendar; the January page says, "If a pretty poster and a cute saying are all that it takes to motivate you, you probably have a very easy job. The kind robots will be doing soon." Just before my calendar came, I got email from unfulfilled@despair.com, excerpted below. -- David I] "We regret to inform you that shipping on your order was delayed until this week. In this email we provide excuses in a customer-mocking fashion and make shallow gestures of remediation. "Please do not infer that Despair actually values the customer. It is simply a defensive gambit, as customers who don't received their order might call their credit card provider to initiate a chargeback. "For those of you unfamiliar with your rights as a credit card holder, a chargeback is something you should NEVER NEVER NEVER EVER attempt. Without getting into too much detail, chargebacks are incredibly dangerous undertakings. They can destroy your credit rating and leave you vulnerable to hackers. They're also not particularly patriotic. "In closing, thank you for your money. Hopefully someday we can figure out how to legally take it without providing anything in return to eliminate having to write this condescending pathetic semi-apology. ------- IF IT'S FUNNY, IT MUST BE TRUE by Scatt Oddams Hey David, Maybe a tiger can't change its stripes but what the U.S. stands for today would put corners on the stripes of its flag. This 'toon lets U.S. off too easy: http://www.dubyadubyadubya.com/. Mikhaela Reid's a 22-year-old Harvard 'tooner, but they didn't teach her this -- http://tinyurl.com/3pyp -- in school. Don't forget, David, that it can be true even if it's not funny. Scatt ------- CONFERENCE ON MY CALENDAR February 4, 2003, Santa Barbara CA. Center for Entrepreneurship and Engineering Management (CEEM) at UC Santa Barbara. http://ceem.engr.ucsb.edu/events.html March 31 through April 3, 2003, San Jose CA. VON. I have a general session TBD on April 1 that I promise will be interesting. April 1 is one of my favorite holidays. You will believe EVERYTHING my panel presents. ------- COPYRIGHT NOTICE: Redistribution of this document, or any part of it, is permitted for non-commercial purposes, provided that the two lines below are reproduced with it: Copyright 2002 by David S. Isenberg isen@isen.com -- http://isen.com/ -- 1-888-isen-com ------- [There are two ways to join the SMART List, which gets you the SMART Letter by email, weeks before it goes up on the isen.com web site. The PREFERRED METHOD is to click on http://isen.com/SMARTreqScript.html and supply the info as indicated. The alternative method is to send a brief, PERSONAL statement to isen@isen.com (put "SMART" in the Subject field) saying who you are, what you do, maybe who you work for, maybe how you see your work connecting to mine, and why you are interested in joining the SMART List.] [to quit the SMART List, send a brief "unsubscribe" message to isen@isen.com] [for past SMART Letters, see http://www.isen.com/archives/index.html] [Policy on reader contributions: Write to me. I won't quote you without your explicitly stated permission. If you're writing to me for inclusion in the SMART Letter, *please* say so. I'll probably edit your writing for brevity and clarity. If you ask for anonymity, you'll get it. ] *--------------------isen.com----------------------* David S. Isenberg isen@isen.com isen.com, inc. 888-isen-com http://isen.com/ 203-661-4798 *--------------------isen.com----------------------* -- The brains behind the Stupid Network -- *--------------------isen.com----------------------*
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