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Technology

3G Is A Dog, And Other Truths 167

Posted by timothy from the still-being-digital dept.
naylorjs writes: "This is an interesting article from the BBC about the technological future, in particular broadband and wireless. What makes it more interesting is the comments about nation states and such like. A certain amount of lateral thinking in use here, something that we don't see enough of in the technology field. IMHO."
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3G Is A Dog, And Other Truths More

3G Is A Dog, And Other Truths

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  • use it new, pay the price. let it mature, and before long you have something better and cheaper than you used to use.

    you don't have to live on the cutting edge all the time. it's really a lot better to wait a little while for cheap, solid tech, instead of jumping on the bandwagon the first time it comes around and realizing you just spent hundreds of dollars on something that sucks.

    • I wouldn't necessarily say it's better to wait. More prudent perhaps.

      Without early adopters it would take a lot longer for technologies to develop to the point were it will be suitable/affordable for the rest of us. You are welcome to wait but someone has to go first, and I think it can be admirable thing to do. They save the rest of you from waiting for the chicken/egg cycle to break.

  • Back in 1992, I thought the web was a stupid idea.

    Even a few years ago, I couldn't imagine what I take for granted now - the instant gratification of being able to answer any question on my mind just by calling up google.

    How can some professor do better?

    • The first time I was exposed to the Internet was through www.playboy.com, and I thought "wow, the Internet is going to bloom so quickly", and it did. I guess you need to be exposed to the right context before correct preditions are made.
      • So what? Does this prove that again, porn is the driving force behind new technology? :)

        Hey...it sold VCRs...
        • Does this prove that again, porn is the driving force behind new technology? :)

          In all seriousness, yes. It's why laserdiscs failed as a popular medium, and why DVDs succeeded. (I have also heard, but not verified, that there was no porn for Betamax.)

          • DVD has succeded so well because the price of the media and the push toward Joe Consumer, not because there's porn of it.
            I can only give you Canadian prices, but if a VHS movie sells for $17 and the DVD sells for $27 and offers much better quality and more features, of course it's going to do well!
            Laserdiscs were priced at anywhere from $80 to $170. Of course that's going to deter people from adopting the technology!

            I have around 40 or so Laserdiscs, but most of them I got used or at inventory closeouts for under $20.

            Hell, I got the original non-special editions of the Star Wars trilogy for US$24.

    • Imagine it now: the instant gratification of being able to answer any question on your mind by calling up google on your palmpilot while screaming upside-down in a rollercoaster.

      I find this point of Negroponte's especially amusing: "the Barbie doll has to be connected in order to get stories, in order to get your content". So it gets better: you can answer any question on your mind by asking your Barbie doll for the answer!

  • Oh, it's such a load of arse. (Score:5, Insightful)

    by yoz ( 3735 ) on Monday October 29, 2001 @10:52PM (#2495671) Homepage
    I mean, really. Negroponte's always been so long on handwaving and short on actual technical pragmatism. And it's not like people have actually listened to a word the man said since "Being Digital".

    Why is broadband good? "Different rhythm, different response time, different way of dealing with the web itself." Yeah, I bet that was your reasoning for getting DSL, too (if you happened to be stoned at the time). Except apparently you wouldn't want DSL because the order-of-magnitude speed increase over a modem "isn't giving the consumer enough difference". Apparently being able to stream live video to a handset isn't worth anything.

    Well, thanks a lot, Nicholas. You can go back in your box for another five years.

    -- Yoz
    • This comment is no different from Negroponte's, except for taking the inverse position. You offer no rationale, no evidence, no argument. It doesn't even really constitute a criticism.

      Why should a reader take your view instead of his? Because it's sardonic?

      • No, because rather than resorting that meaningless hand-waving, I'm calling upon those who read this to look to their reasonable experience of Internet usage at different access speeds and realise why anyone who says that moving from 28.8 to 384 "isn't a big enough leap" is clearly talking arse. You have the evidence. That's my argument. Well, one of them, anyway.

        -- Yoz
    • He may have exagerated a bit, but he is right on the point of speed increases. The upgrade from 9600bps to 14.4Kbps must have been a big thing at the time (disclaimer: I started at 33.8), but now if someone said they could give me an extra 4.8Kbps on my DSL line (the canadian kind: 1.5Mbps/384Kbps and cheap as hell) I would offer to pay a penny per month. Then again, I have to question anyone who thinks they're important because they've discovered that technology grows exponentially.
    • Actually read this article?? Started out makeing some sense and ended stoned hippy ramblings.... not that that is a bad thing. I do think the drugs had started to kick in nicely by the end.

  • What companys don't realize (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward
    What companys don't realize is giving the ability to instant messange on a phone is kinda self defeating. You can just call the person. So no one is going to swich from standerd cell phones to much more expensive ones for useful purposes, just for the cool factor. And you can't make that much money of it.

    • Re:What companys don't realize (Score:4, Informative)

      by rcs1000 ( 462363 ) <<moc.liamg> <ta> <0001scr>> on Monday October 29, 2001 @11:07PM (#2495723)
      That's a little beside the point. In Europe, some operators make (Telia, Sonera, Orange UK) make more than 10% of cellular revenues from SMS. (Short Messaging Service, the GSM IM solution.)

      Because SMS is a store-and-forward technology it is bandwidth unintensive (or at least, can be fitted around other network traffic). And at 15c a message, it is pretty lucrative.

      Find the European cellular operator that makes less money from SMS than other data revenues. Right now instant messaging is the only data application that is remotely profitable.

      • I can see some uses for it from a user's perspective, but at 15c a message, why not just call the person? I'm currently paying 10c a minute for cell service and it would be easier to just talk to them rather than try to type it out on a phone. I'm sure the operators love it, though.

        • Re:What companys don't realize (Score:5, Insightful)

          by Ecyrd ( 51952 ) on Tuesday October 30, 2001 @05:27AM (#2496213)
          Because it's in many cases more convinient. Think about it: in the US it's common to have answering machines for sending short messages to people. Some people even get annoyed when you answer the phone, and ask you to hang up "so that they can just leave a message on the machine". You don't always want to talk to people.

          Even though you can only cram 160 characters into an SMS message using 12 buttons of your tiny keyboard on a 3x10 character screen, SMS basically fulfils the role of mobile email. It may be expensive, but it's still very usable.

          SMSs are also very non-intrusive. You can check your messages in the middle of a movie, or a meeting, or at midnight, and nobody would get annoyed by you talking on the phone at that time. If you suddenly remember something you needed to tell someone, you can just drop a small SMS to him. Some people send grocery shopping lists to their SOs - much better than reading one out loud, since you can always store the message and check it out when you're in a store. I personally use the text writing ability to store reminders for myself when my PDA is in my bag, or I forgot it somewhere.

          In Finland, TV channels now run SMS -based chat shows when they have no scheduled programming. You can send your message to be viewed by everyone with a TV by paying only $1 USD! Sounds like a bad deal? Probably, but that does not stop people
          sending hundreds of messages an hour to these moderated chat shows.

          It's true what they say: in every new technology, e-mail is the killer application.

          This may be hard to believe when you haven't seen it in action, but I think it's just a matter of time when the US also joins the SMS craze.
          • In the UK text messaging (SMS) is huge. Almost everyone over the age of 12 now has a phone, and teens are famous here for communicating mostly by SMS.

            My partner (29) and her best friend, (30something) hardly ever their phones to make voice calls. I see people using text phones like Motorola V100 [amazon.com] and Nokia 5510 [nokia.com] all the time now.
            The instant messaging analogy is correct - people don't want to talk to other people all the time - why do you think that Post-It Notes became so popular?

          • The dropping grocery lists or other such things are nice and I already receive them via email on my cell phone w/o the extra cost. I just can't send them. Based on entering text for the phonebook in my cell phone, I certainly wouldn't use SMS very often. That is unless I had something like the Visorphone or any other PDA/cell phone combo where I could use a stylus.

            I don't doubt that it's useful. I just can't see myself using an awkward interface and paying 15c a message for it. I'm a cheap bastard at heart.

    • Re:What companys don't realize (Score:1, Informative)

      by Anonymous Coward

      It's 8am on Sunday and you're excruciatingly hungover. Tthe concept of actually having to talk to someone (let alone get out of bed) is way beyond your grasp but you are supposed to meet a friend to go scuba diving in an hour. SMS is an excellent way of being absolutely certain you won't have to engage in an actual conversation with them, while still allowing you to let them know you are piking on the dive plan (this happens to me a lot).

      SMS is a handy way of quickly passing on information to multiple people. It's also a good way of passing on a quick message without having to have a conversation - there are a lot of situations where you can't talk but you can type.

      And for the phone companies... should an SMS be replied to, requiring a further reply, they get to charge you for each snippet of the message - so they make more off you than they would have with the equivalent voice call.

      And to the question of handsets... all handsets currently available here (Australia) are SMS capable. So what's the big deal? People change their handset every couple of years anyway.

  • Why is this a surprise? (Score:4, Informative)

    by djrogers ( 153854 ) on Monday October 29, 2001 @10:53PM (#2495679)
    It was an interesting interview, don't get me wrong, but news outlets like The Register [theregister.co.uk] have been telling the truth about 3G for over 2 years - for some reason there's been a stubborn refusal to believe it - perhaps because it's not what we want to hear?

  • Standards have gone down at MIT... (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Cutriss ( 262920 ) on Monday October 29, 2001 @10:58PM (#2495695) Homepage
    Funny...for someone who works at one of the most technically-apt universities in North America, I didn't expect to hear this from him: Again, they have lost a lot of money on 3G for reasons that had nothing to do with the marketing side of 3G. It had to do with the terrible mistake made here in the UK over the auction process that was copying a bad American idea and repeating it here. It's a dog and people shouldn't want it and in fact I don't think it will see the light of day.

    3G isn't bad. The American handling of 3G is, but you shouldn't punish consumers because of the fact you believe the standard is crap. If everyone cared about what America wanted in its consumer electronics standards, then America wouldn't be the sole dissenting voice in cellular standards. The problem isn't one of technology here, but one of corporate moneylust getting in the way of good ol' common sense.

    Look at how consumer electronics devices have blossomed in the Orient...They've made 3G devices a part of their lives. The reason it won't work here is because our society as a whole looks down on a lot of the new technology as being fad-ish. Until marketers get a clue and discover just how to pitch these devices and demonstrate how they can complete our meaningless lives, they're not gonna take off.

    Marketers for the last five years have been following the logic which carried them through the Internet bust, which was - "If you build it, they will come." Well, no shit, Sherlock...but you have to build something that's worth a damn to them. Quit trying to push off crap and market it as the next great thing...instead, make something that can change our lives, and prove that it will.

    Many companies could afford to learn this lesson from Apple.

    • Look at how consumer electronics devices have blossomed in the Orient...They've made 3G devices a part of their lives. The reason it won't work here is because our society as a whole looks down on a lot of the new technology as being fad-ish. Until marketers get a clue and discover just how to pitch these devices and demonstrate how they can complete our meaningless lives, they're not gonna take off.
      Sorry, but I find it difficult to believe that 3G itself as it is presently configured is of any real value to people. Nor have I seen any evidence to contradict this. You suggest that the devices are selling in the "Orient", well fine, but this does not mean 3G itself is worth anything even over there. Firstly, are they really using the features that only 3G offers (e.g., streaming video)? Secondly, have the 3G devices themselves really penetrated the bulk their market, more than just the few early adopters (finding the 3G part is worth little, but keeping the devices anyways). Thirdly, has 3G been profitable over there, on the aggregate, for the device and service providers? In other words, if the devices only sell when the providers engage in ruinous competition or are soaked in government subsidies, it cannot be used as proof of its net worth to society.

      I'm very skeptical and I have absolutely no invested interest in this matter other than that as a consumer. Any one of the above questions can (or should) sink the worth of 3G in the respective countries. What's more, the question remains if the investment in 3G is more worthwhile than investment in other infrastructures and devices. For instance, I, for one, would rather have a seemlessly integrated PDA, Cell Phone, Wireless email (and maybe light weight web) device [similar to the Treo...possibly] than a cell phone with streaming video and little else [Especially given the current limitations on battery life, data entry, screen size, and so on.]

  • Online Dolls (Score:2, Interesting)

    by sasha328 ( 203458 )
    A: First of all, put that in context that the largest amount of semi-conductor material to flow into the home will undoubtedly be through toys. It's not TV sets; it's not refrigerators; it's not PCs; it's not handsets - it's going to be toys. The reason I use that Barbie doll example is that the Barbie doll has to be connected in order to get stories, in order to get your content.

    Somehow, I think the online contents for a Barbie doll will be quite minimal.

    On a serious note, I think he's got a point there. Imagine one of these toys always getting an updated interface (audio) to interact with the children. Interesting.
    • Imagine that old Microsoft Barney toy.
    • Ever see the movie Small Soldiers? I don't think I want my bits and atoms coming together so quickly.

    • Re:Online Dolls (Score:4, Interesting)

      by dragons_flight ( 515217 ) on Monday October 29, 2001 @11:51PM (#2495816) Homepage
      Until I read that part of the article, I thought the guy might have some sense. After the ramble of bits and atoms coming together, I was forced to conclude that this guy fits in the same category as telephone psychics. He provides vaguely interesting impractical information about what he thinks you want to hear or are afraid to hear. Some of the things he says get just plain weird after he strays from 3G and broadband, and what he has to say in those arenas is hardly original to begin with.

      For my part, I have a problem with much of the tech that gets put into toys, because it tends to decrease the value of the thing as a toy. For instance stuffed animals with flashing lights and speech capabilities aren't the ones kids take to bed because no one likes feeling the hard boxes inside, nor the distractions of mechanisms that won't turn off. Some electronic toys are so complicated and inflexible that they aren't worth the trouble of playing with or learning to use. Toys which are so inflexible as to only do one trick (and insist on doing regardless of what the child wants) will end up at the bottom of the closet shortly after having demonstrated their one trick.
      • Yup - I hated that bit as well. We've all heard about/seen kids at Christmas ignoring the big flashy "thing" and playing with the box. Boxes are great - they can be boats, cars, houses etc. Imagination is a good thing (no TM - no profit). I hate the idea that all toys will be spoonfeeding ideas to kids (especially when you think where those ideas are going to come from) until they have no need for imagination and can only repeat advertising slogans (like my partner's eight year old).

        Back (more) on topic, what wont help 3G (in the UK) is that now:
        - Companies now need planning permission to put up masts/ariels.
        - Higher frequencies = more masts
        - The tabloid press has conviced half the population that the microwave radation will give them cancer/AIDS/anthrax.
      • Toys which are so inflexible as to only do one trick (and insist on doing regardless of what the child wants) will end up at the bottom of the closet shortly after having demonstrated their one trick.

        Toys like that aren't sold to children, they are sold to parents. I think to parents that spend too much time making money and not enough with the kids... You'd think they'd notice when the kids put the toy through its single trick three times, then play with the box.
    • Who would be deciding what the children hear. Damn, I thought all I'd have to do is keep my kids from watching TV; next it's toys, then what? Direct access to brainwaves?

    • This is just so Neal Stephenson... the concept of education for kids being delivered as content into devices that have what would now seem to us to be the strangest UI's.

    • Or use Barbie as a phone, listen at the mouth, speak into the... Also think about having a Barbie with a face formed out of some OLED or similar material driven by a video signal coming over a 3G connection, so she could have facial expressions, couple that with the sort of technology used by Annanova and kids could get all the latest news the music charts or Barbie accessories and see Barbie actually speaking it. That would be truly interactive.
    • The online barbie makes perfect sense, because it fits with what companies actually are doigng today: marketing to children. Think of the time kids spend watching TV, and the way in which commercials have crept into programs until the programs for kids are commercials.

      The online Barbie is both a product (the doll) a service (the connection) and a medium (the content). The toy companies can make money from all three.

      I'm not so sure it makes as much sense from the parents' viewpoint.

      My wife was conflicted over Barbie, until she finally caved on her feminist principles. And you know what? Everything was fine. Our daughter's Barbies had powers beyond those of mortal dolls -- they did weird and wacky things,to the annoyance of her more, uh, conventional playmates. Despite the accourtrements of the Barbie lifestyle Barbie is still just a hunk of inanimate plastic that comes to life through the child's imagination.

      The online smart Barbie has the potential to be much more -- to the detriment of the child's play. Here's a plausible business model: you buy a Barbie which can act out stories. The more different models you collect, the more stories you can get. It will be like television, but more compelling.

  • Where are the applications? (Score:5, Insightful)

    by rcs1000 ( 462363 ) <<moc.liamg> <ta> <0001scr>> on Monday October 29, 2001 @11:03PM (#2495710)
    One of the big problems of technology is that the world is broken into four groups who don't really understand each other.

    Firstly, there are the technologists - the smart guys with their engineering PhDs from Stanford and the like who work for Ericsson, Qualcomm or Nokia. These people understand the technical reality of getting broadband services to handsets and the like.

    Then there are the evangalists. These people post long, largely ill-informed, comments to slashdot. Sometimes they work for Gartner Group. If they're really lucky they get paid too much to work as VCs. These people don't really understand the technology, or consumers, but they tell a great story. Oh, and they love Amazon.com.

    And then there are the business people. (And no, getting an MBA from Stanford does not automatically qualify you.) These people understand that 3G costs losts of money. They fret about what end demand will really be, and hire evangalists and technologists to try and raise some money. If they are lucky they get to sell their idea to some large company where the business development people really do have Stanford MBAs.

    Finally, there is the other 99% of the population. Call them 'consumers'. They are rarely consulted about what they want; 'cause, hey, the evangalist tells a better story. Unfortunately, these are the people that actually buy and use the service. Unless consumers spend money the service will die.

    So, to 3G: unless consumers see a compelling reason to massively up the amount they spend on telecommunications then 3G is in terrible trouble. ARPU for voice cell users is static or declining as penetration rises. (Why is this so? Because the handset, network infrastructure, maintenance, and license costs are much higher than 2G.)

    So - where are the compelling applications that will encourage consumers to spend more?

    Video phones, perhaps. Would you like a list of companies that died thinking consumers want to be seen on the phone. (Just think for a moment about the practicalities of walking down the street with your cell phone in front of you. Then think about the value of looking at someone in glorious jerky-and-small-vision with terrible lag.)

    Stock quotes and charts, perhaps. Sorry, the days and number of day traders are on the wane.

    OK. TV? Well perhaps, BUT think of the bandwidth requirements.

    Email??? Sure, but a Blackberry or GPRS phone does it for cheaper.

    Unless someone can find compelling *consumer* applications, then 3G is unlikely to be a commercial success.

    *r
  • 3G has been a pipe dream from it's inception.

    Services like the lately lamented Ricochet provided speeds superior to those promised by 3G over a year ago - and people apparently didn't want to pa $70.00 per month to access the TCP/IP services in metro areas that Ricochet provided - even with unlimited access, or all-you-can-eat for that price.

    3G is looking worse and worse every day. What did 3G promise?

    500kbps - if you're standing still next to an unloaded base station. 120kbps standing still on a loaded network. 60kbps if you're moving - all with per-minute and/or per megabyte charges. It won't fly here in the U.S.

    Hopefully someone will revive Ricochet and we can all surf wirelessly without the foibles of "freenet" 802.11b networks or the limitations of fixed wireless. But I wouldn't bet on it.

    • Re:Well, duh. (Score:3, Interesting)

      by szcx ( 81006 )
      It won't fly here in the U.S.
      It wont be given the chance to fly here. The military has effectively stopped the auction of the 3G spectrum to commercial interests in the US by using it for military communications.

      According to the Pentagon, it would be detrimental to national security for them to re-tool equipment to use different frequncies. In the current political climate, nobody is going to force the issue.

  • Have you tried it? (Score:2, Interesting)

    by Scottaroo ( 461317 )
    Have you ever really tried to do any of this stuff with a phone? Browse the web? Get your email? It's useless on a phone. The screen is too small and entering information into the phone is an exercise in frustration. Or you end up with a phone like the Kyocera [kyocera.com] which is a great palm, but sucks as a phone. Ever try actually holding it to your face and talking on it?

    I'm all for cool technology and doing things that are cool just for the sake of doing it, but John Q. Public is never going to accept this stuff if it's a pain to use. It solves a problem that doesn't exist.

    Scottaroo
    • I own the VisorPhone, and I absolutely love it, both as a phone, and as the organizer that it integrates with. I can keep all my contact information in one place — every phone number goes straight into the Address database — and I can dial any of those people with 2-3 taps of the stylus. It's not horribly inconvenient to hold up to my head, and if I'm using it for any length of time, I generally plug in my EarBoom headset [fellowes.com].

      Those are just its phone capabilities. The internet features are incredible. VoiceStream doesn't charge extra for data use, so it just comes out of my normal minutes (I do need a dialup account, however). I can read and post to Slashdot. I can check my mail and reply to anything urgent. And for longer emails/posts, I pull out my fold-up Stowaway keyboard and type at full speed.

      And John Q. Public loves this thing, if every single person who sees it saying "that's dope/cool/really neat/interesting" is any indication...

    • It's useful when you hook your laptop up to the phone. Then you have broadband access whereever you, not just at home/work.
    • I agree that the applications seem pretty lame right now, but J2ME is coming to cellphones in the US. (Motorola SDK link)http://www.wirelessdevnet.com/columns/oct2000 /mobdev13.html

      If we combine better hardware(screen resolution, cost), J2ME (large developer pool), and broadband, I think someone can cook up a worthwhile application that people will want to use.
    • The most popular application by far in Western Europe where GSM has really taken off is SMS.


      The users are mostly kids with limited phone budgets who want to maximize their telephone use. SMS is ridiculously cheap, it uses essentially one frame to transfer a message. It is incredibly profitable for the telephone company, and unlike a telephone call, you can send and receive SMS messages anywhere.

  • Nicholas Negroponte is fairly bright, but I think some of the things he talks about (e.g. giving UN membership to Nation1 [mit.edu], a "virtual nation" composed of the world's internet-enabled children) are a bit too loony to be taken seriously

  • Computer First, Phone Second (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Erasei ( 315737 ) on Monday October 29, 2001 @11:19PM (#2495745) Homepage
    I have a cell phone. I have a desktop. I have a server, and I have a portable MP3 player. I have a truck. I have a bike, and I have a muscle car.

    I say that, to say this: I did not buy an El Camino. I bought a truck, and I bought (well, restored) a muscle car.

    The same goes for my desktop and server. I did not buy an over powered dual-NICed desktop to also be my server on a dsl line. I bought a desktop, and a dsl line to connect to, and a Ultra Sparc in a colocated rack at a local ISP.

    In the same sort of thinking, my cell phone doesn't play MP3s, although it can surf the web, I have never even bothered to try it.

    To the average consumer, a phone should be a phone, first and foremost.

    Features are good if they are free, but forcing me to pay twice the price for useless stuff I would never use, just makes me spend my money at another company.
    • Damn that's too cool. I mean, that's a lot of stuff.

      But isn't paying for a _personal_ sparc server _and_ dsl line paying "twice the price for useless stuff"?

      If you consider yourself joe average consumer, g3 would be expected to be a smashing success! You're not average though, and g3 flunks the big one -- but damn you've got some nifty toys! Just don't smack me over the head and tell me that you got all that _and_ a wife and family.
  • There was an interesting article [technologyreview.com] last year in MIT's Technology Review Magazine about Negroponte leaving the Media Lab, leaving the Lab's future uncertain. The article makes a number of references to the Media Lab, including Biotech Research. It's interesting that he still refers to the Lab as "we" - I assume it's hard to let go, and probably good for the Lab to keep him around as an advisor.
    • You could ofcourse have checked the Media Lab website to see where Nicholas Negroponte is. He is still there on the webpage. http://www.media.mit.edu/~nicholas/

      He is working there as a director in a foreign minister role. Not strange after having been its director for about 15 years.

  • The government doesn't like 3G (Score:5, Interesting)

    by CmdrTroll ( 412504 ) on Monday October 29, 2001 @11:25PM (#2495758) Homepage
    There are many factors that have contributed to the delays surrounding 3G availability. Indeed, one needs to look no farther than the FCC spectrum allocation mess and the technological issues to see why the rollout hasn't happened yet. However there are some very real reasons under the surface that help explain why the Federal government doesn't want 3G to exist at all. For instance:

    • 3G will start a new wave of competition amongst the major phone companies. If Sprint offers 3G services and SBC doesn't, Sprint's market share will increase, so SBC and the other competitors need to keep up. Now take a look at the money flowing to powerful people [opensecrets.org] in Washington and see who the top contributors are - BellSouth and SBC are pretty high up there. It is not in their best interest to see 3G happen and they are paying off Congressmen left and right to make sure it doesn't happen (in this lifetime at least).
    • Law enforcement regards 3G as a nightmare. Think about it - cell phones that have enough bandwidth to transmit encrypted datastreams between phones. And not the cheesy 40-bit breakable encryption that they use on current PCS systems, either. They're worried about people loading 128 bit Blowfish or IDEA encoders onto their phones and using them to communicate securely. Roving wiretaps are useless if all you can gather from them is white noise. No wiretaps == no control, and law enforcement exists to control.
    • If 3G service is commoditized (think "Tracfone") and potentially anonymous, what's to keep criminals, ACLU members and privacy nuts, and WTO protestors from using disposable phones to communicate securely? By the time they traced one phone, the subject will have moved onto another one. Anonymous voice services are "bad enough" for The Man, but anonymous data services will wrestle even more control away from authority.
    • 3G service is difficult to disrupt when making a covert search of somebody's apartment or office. If FBI agents can't knock all of your computers off the network, you can see everything they do if you have a few $30 webcams planted around the joint. The FBI wants you to have a broadband service that they can monitor, but disconnect at will as well (preferably by cutting a cable). It is a known fact that on most covert searches (such as the Scarfo search) the FBI cuts off communication lines prior to the search. 3G or Ricochet is difficult to work with on their end, and their excuse for opposing it is that it will give the Scarfos of the world a leg up on law enforcement.

    -CT

    • The idea of anonymous disposable phones would be a problem to law enforcement. I wouldn't be surprised to see legislation passed that would heavily lean on providers to not offer such services. As far as searches go, why couldn't they just contact the provider and have them disconnect or disrupt service? As far as I know, these aren't high powered digital walkie-talkies, so they still need a service provider. Laws will be passed to make sure providers can provide names, phone numbers, phone ids, etc. to the appropriate agencies. Also, what would stop the FBI from jamming the 3G signals in the immediate area of the search?

      The competition angle is probably the biggest reason. The cell phone companies like having their own fiefdoms each with incompatible phones.

      • Here in France you can get essentially anonymous GSM service using a prepaid mobicarte or SFR SIM card. They asked me my name and they have it in a database somewhere, and they might have asked me for id, I don't recall, but at any rate it wasn't any form of id officially recognized in France such as a passport, so it could easily have been false. The handset is your standard handset of course, so it's not disposable, unless you're wealthy, but as far as I know nothing stops you from buying as many handsets as you want anonymously.

        • In the US, for most plans, they will ask for your Social Security Number in order to run a credit check. This isn't needed for prepaid plans, but when I signed up for one, they still wanted a picture id (drivers license), adddress, etc. IIRC, customer support still asks for some of that info. Of course ids can be faked, so it's not like any of this foolproof.

          There are a few companies trying to make disposable [cnet.com] phones that are made of paper and/or have such limited features that they are very cheap and the cost of the phone will be very small compared to the prepaid air time. How Stuff Works has an article [howstuffworks.com] about them too. From what I understand, you have the advantage of a standard handset that can be used with any provider. That's my biggest pet peeve with the US cell phone system.

    • Re:The government doesn't like 3G (Score:2, Informative)

      by Anonymous Coward
      Uh, I wouldn't get too excited about cryptostreams between phones just yet.

      The 3GPP standard on which 3G is based requires that the platform support what is called "lawful interception." See http://www.3gpp.org/ for details.

      Also, the phones don't really have the capacity (in CPU cycles or the watts to drive them, which is the real limiting factor) to do secure crypto of realtime traffic.

    • Many 3G phones are unlikely to let you install your own software - but in any case, you could just put your software on a laptop or PDA that is 3G-connected, so it's quite easy to use encryption on top of 3G as you say. However, this already applies to users of wireless LAN hotspots, and the former users of Ricochet - and GPRS and CDMA2000 1x, both 2.5G, will provide 100 Kbps or more eventually.

      Anonymous 3G accounts are fairly unlikely - perhaps when 3G is very widespread and commoditised, but initially it will be for pay-monthly use only.

      I don't see why it's so hard to disrupt 3G service - it's just a matter of causing the 3G network to disconnect that one phone (break any current network attachment [to the GPRS core netw\ork], and disable its account so it can't reconnect. Unlike some technologies, 3G is designed to let the provider bill for every packet that is transmitted, so it's may be as easy as just marking the account as 'invalid', causing the real-time billing system to prevent new connections.

    • Think about it - cell phones that have enough bandwidth to transmit encrypted datastreams between phones. And not the cheesy 40-bit breakable encryption that they use on current PCS systems, either.

      Clarification: Encryption and bandwidth are orthogonal. Properly implemented encryption, whether of stronger or weaker varieties, adds almost zero data to the stream. Increased bandwidth does nothing to either facilitate or hamper the use of strong crypto.

      More powerful processors in the phones can facilitate the use of some forms of strong crypto, but really the processors are already powerful enough. Modern symmetric block and stream ciphers are amazingly efficient and even very tiny processors can easily execute RC4 at a rate of 4KB per second. Digitizing and compressing the audio is much more difficult.

      Tiny processors do have a hard time with RSA private key operations (public key ops are much simpler, given small public exponents), which means that RSA can be used for symmetric key exchange but not authentication, but some sort of password-based authentication could be used -- or users could just authenticate verbally.

      So, 3G is irrelevant to law enforcement in this respect. Programmable phones that allow user-loaded software to perform computations on the encoded data streams would scare the bejeezus out of them, though.

      • Tiny processors do have a hard time with RSA private key operations (public key ops are much simpler, given small public exponents), which means that RSA can be used for symmetric key exchange but not authentication,

        Duh... committed a thinko here. No, low-powered processors without hardware large integer math coprocessors cannot usefully use RSA for anything. The device sending the symmetric key doesn't need much power to perform the public key encryption, but the receiving device has to perform a private key op to decrypt it -- no go.

        • Right. You can do pretty good symmetric (secret) key crypto even with 8-bitters. So if you can figure out how to download and run a program in your 3G phone, you can send the symmetric key by other channels (hand carry, or RSA on a desktop), then use it encrypt and decode messages. What you can't do is what PGP does: create a random symmetric key for each message, and send that using RSA encryption...

          Messages passed on a public system have to have un-encrypted destination headers, and in many cases the system will also require an accurate unencrypted source ID. They can't tell what you are saying, but they can tell who you are saying it to, and how often you exchanged messages, etc. Last week a man was convicted of murder, partly because his cell phone made a call from the murder scene at about the time of the murder...

          For counter-terror, the issue is deciding whose phone needs to be watched -- and then identifying that phone. Disposable phones will certainly complicate that. Encryption isn't that much of a complication. If they are sending messages in the clear, they'll probably disguise the meaning anyway ("Meet you at the WTC on the 11th"), so the most important thing you'll find out is who your suspects talk to.
          • Agreed. From everything I've read, law enforcement only uses wiretaps relatively rarely (which has always made me wonder why they raise such a stink about it -- unless they actually use illegal wiretaps a *lot* and just don't mention that evidence in court...), but examining records of calls (traffice analysis) is a major tool in every kind of investigation

  • Credibility? Bitch, please! (Score:5, Interesting)

    by szcx ( 81006 ) on Monday October 29, 2001 @11:28PM (#2495764)
    Nicholas Negroponte is the same guy who predicted that there would be $1 trillion in e-commerce by 2000, and that micropayments will "change consumer behavior enormously". According to Nostraponte, site visitors have no problem whatsoever in paying a few cents for every article they read.

    The guy is a pundit dressed in academic clothing, nothing more.

    • >According to Nostraponte, site visitors have no
      >problem whatsoever in paying a few cents for
      >every article they read.

      Which turns out to be absolutely correct for most people. I pay a monthly fee for unmetered low bandwidth allowing me to browse the web for, er, a few small coins a minute or, in pratical terms, per article. For article read whatever you want - and people will pay differing rates - so the gamer will be happy to pay a bit more for their chunk to be bigger or faster.

      A yes, you say, but they are not paying for the article _itself_. True and this is maybe why people are reluctant to pay, effectively, twice.

      C

    • Nicholas Negroponte is the same guy who predicted that there would be $1 trillion in e-commerce by 2000, and that micropayments will "change consumer behavior enormously.

      Negroponte is yet another snake-oil salesman kept alive by the popular 'science' press.

      They are always chasing sexy projects with results always being "around the corner".

      Given the untold number of millions spend in the media lab, what do they have to show for it??

    • Nicholas Negroponte is the same guy who predicted that ... micropayments will "change consumer behavior enormously".

      What's your problem with this statement? Untill someone implements micropayments, this prediction cannot be proved or disproved. So, what's your point? That he was wrong in the sense that we still don't have micropayments? Is that his fault?

  • So Negroponte suggests that soon there will be more Barbie dolls connected to the Internet than Americans, because "the Barbie doll has to be connected in order to get stories, in order to get your content". Cute idea.

    So, the miracle of 3G is that soon your home encyclopedia will be replaced by the wireless talking Barbie! Bet that will shed her dumb blonde image...

  • With that as a backdrop, the truth is that what consumers want is a logarithmic scale.

    I think this is the most interesting part of the article. IT is pretty much the only industry where consumers expect giant leaps in terms of performance before they upgrade. What other classical industry demands such high rates of devellopment? automotive? textile? Not really. People have come to expect more and more out of engineers over the years and the R&D to keep up with the demand has been ever increasing. Are we going to get to a point where progress is just too great and the users have no more need to upgrade, or is progress going to lag behind, thus reducing incomes and R&D --> vicious circle. I think there's a limit to how much speed is needed and that will give rise to a serious problem in a few years. What will happen when you can stream digital video uncompressed along with audio, playing games, etc on the same optic pipe? Will people go on upgrading endlessly just to show their friends "look, I can transfer my swap file from my PDA to my cell faster than you can!"...
    • ... and you have a good point, too. I think the growth of bandwidth will end when the resolution of the virtual worlds served will reach the resolution of our senses (plus-minus a few terabits per second...). At that point, the data pipeline will be as good as the current water/electric etc. pipelines: no need to upgrade for long years.

      But it is not only the bandwidth which may force you to switch. SMS is a killer application with ridiculously low bandwidth requirements. And mobility itself is a killer application.

  • "If you look at some of the real winners today - I'll pick Ireland, I'll pick Norway, I'll pick Singapore, I'll pick Costa Rica - these are countries which have done really quite well in the digital world. The four of them have something really interesting in common and that is that each one of them is 3.5 million people - there is a kind of a magic about the number of 3.5 million - it turns about to be a reasonable size. "

    Well, almost.

    When I last checked, Norway had a good 4,5 million people, Singapore some 4,3 million and Ireland 3,8 million. His guess for Costa Rica is quite close with 3,7 million, but is 3 out of 4 really that good for a "genius".

    No big deal, I know, but it still wrecks his magic number ;)

  • ... we'll probably just have to leave it (cool phones) to Japan, like all the other ideas originally assumed to be dumb in the west (walkmans, robot dogs, etc).

    'Sfunny, though, I would have thought that NN, with his cyberbooster past, would have been all over this. Maybe he's just getting to old to use a mobile phone. He probably can't cope with the buttons. The article says that he wears his reading glasses in restaurants so that he can see what he is eating.


  • Nowhere did it say that the link was a Negroponte interview!!!

    Now how do I get the cooties out of my apron?

  • You have to be careful when using Barbie in the context of a social commentary, lest you get SLAPPed by Mattel.

    -frank

  • This guy still has his head in the clouds as far as the role of technology in day to day life. Online newspaper readership is not a barometer of the success or failure of the internet as a business venture. In the US, and in the world in general, e-commerce is a bomb. Billions were invested, with little to show for it except fancy $700 chairs, nice servers, and ebay. E-commerce was supposed to be the next revolution in business, bigger than the dawn of the industrial age. It was, for about 2 years, then the bottom fell out of the dot.com business model, because there was nothing concrete to show for it. This is, I think the point that he was trying to convey. We want results, not vapor. 3G is not going to be an easy transition any place that has a lot of acreage to cover. In Japan, it is much easier; the cellular situation there is a monoply. The same company owns the towers, the sevice, and the phones. If they want to implement a new technology, they do it. But look at how small Japan is, and the really cool stuff is only in Tokyo; a big enough market, in a small enough area. 3G is not easily implemented, and is not a viable solution, for the US.
    • ah what the hell, time to burn some karma.
      <dot-bomb rant>
      I live in Canada, and I can tell you why I think the dot coms went under. Apart from stupid dog shit retailers - buying stuff online is WAY too expensive. See, I go to a site and toss something (eg, a hard drive) into my shopping cart, then check it out, and total it up. Woooeee! Check out that exchange rate on the CDN dollar, cost of my purchase just jumped up 1.5 times! Leading to Problem 1) Currency exchange shock turns me away from etailers.

      After my heart stops palpitating from the exchange shock, I then get to choose my delivery method, ooohboy! This is FUN, add $50 US bucks to overnight my purchase over the border with tariffs and more penalites ( no way to predict the cost of that, usually another $50 bucks though), or add $15 bucks US to have it delivered by ground over the border ( tariffs and taxes still apply) that could take up to 6 weeks. Leading to Problem 2) Border tariffs and taxes, plus wait time make "instant online purchasing" not so instant. So much for Free Trade, and NAFTA. Canadians did not want it, and I honestly do not see the benifits.

      All of a sudden, that hard drive price doesn't look so good anymore. It is cheaper, faster, and better for my local economy to just wait until Monday morning and hop down to my local computer shop and get the hard drive there.
      </rant>

      As for 3G, so many companies are pushing competing technologies out the door trying to be first and corner the market, that I, as a consumer of these products, do not know what is what. HDTV, Digital Cable, Sattelite TV; DRM, SDMI, Burn-proof CDs, Rip-proof CDs. DVD-ROM, DVD-RAM, DVD-RW, DVD-whateverthehellHPjustimplementedDVD; and on and on , now my cellphone can interface with my airline luggage and book me a seat in a Milan bistro using GPS, but my damn PDA cannot handle the interference from my cordless phone, and why can't someone jsut put out a useful webpad?!?

      I would rather use a webpad that can do all that a low-end PC can, that is the size of an etch-a sketch. Phone, pager, email, simple games, web, surf all for $500 bucks. But no, every company with a R&D dept. is out there doing there own little Token Ring proprietary-like shit in the personal appliance market.

      I'm not buying a damn cell-phone with all that useless shit, or a goddamn mp3 player that takes digital pictures! Too many products out there right now have a whizzbang secondary purpose slapped on top of their primary role.

      The consumer communications and entertainement market right now is kind of like attaching a hot-plate to your PC so you can cook Ramen noodles and still not miss a beat in your Quake]|[.
      Neat, but not neccessary.

  • No one honestly cares! Now, before you dismiss this as "troll", let's take an honest look at the situation:

    I have a Motorola StarTAC using Sprint's service. Now, outside of the occasional dropped calls, I don't have a complaint about the quality of the service. Guess what I use my phone for? That's right, sending and receiving phone calls, which is exactly what 90% of America uses their phone for.

    My phone is "wireless web capable". I have never used it... it doesn't appeal to me. Everytime I've seen someone using "wireless web" it looks like a novelty. 4 lines with maybe 25 characters each... nothing particularly special.

    I don't have a burning desire to check my e-mail from my mobile phone... the last thing I need is some damned electronic leash. If I'm not in front of my computer, it's because I'm not doing work; if I'm not doing work, the last thing I want is to be interrupted by e-mail.

    My mobile phone has a PCMCIA interface to allow "dial-up" through the cell service. The attachment runs about $200, and the speed is 19.2Kbps. I would think that if you really needed to have a wireless internet connection, 19.2Kbps would be fine. Let's face it, if having an internet connection anywhere is THAT important to you, you're probably using it for business purposes. That means e-mail, possibly messaging co-workers. No, you can't VPN into the intranet at 19.2Kbps, but I wouldn't want to try it at the numbers 3G LIKELY produces ("see, you'll get 1Mbps, but only if you're standing still between these blocks during the vernal equinox...").

    Most every mobile provider offers quick messaging, and several of them DO offer e-mail to the phone.

    Instead of concentrating on videophones or MP3 trading or full-color sega produced videogames, how about improving the phones? My StarTAC is fairly small, but it's not as sturdy as I would have liked. Give me a a solid 2G phone with an aluminum or titanium skin that can take a beating, and a battery that gives me 8-10 hours talk time. I'll jump on that phone for $500 long before I'd buy a 3G videophone/e-mail device/Game Boy wannabe/MP3 player for $200.

    • I think it will (Score:3, Interesting)

      by boky ( 220626 )
      All the arguments you have given are (kind of) true. But just check out Japan. Their phones have at least 160x160px (and less than 90 grams weight), most are in color. And that's more than enough to use "wireless web access". 4x25 was what killed WAP, it's not what will kill 3G.

      Japanese people are tottaly into mobile phones. They use them for iMode, phone-calls, mail, surfing, sending eachother pictures and some-kind-of MIDI files etc. etc. etc.

      The catch is that with 3G you will not have a phone anymore but a multimedia all-purpose communication device.
      • First, the Japanese culture generally seems to be more in to tech gadgets than the American culture. Look at some of the thigns (Tamagochi) that have been huge successes over there while enjoying at most a modest (and usually less) success over here. Just because many Japanese consumers like multimedia phones, doesn't mean many Americans will. I certianly won't buy one so long as my StarTAC keeps working.

        Second, getting 3G up and running in the US is going to cost a LOT. Remember, Japan is smaller than the state of Calafornia. There is a lot more square footage in the US that would need to have 3G equipment installed in. That higher cost of startup leads to higher inital service fees, which most people don't want to pay. This is espically true if the objective is to provide good coverage and high speed access.

        Also along those lines 3G will have adoption troubles until there is a nice nationwide network. Right now my CDMA 1900 Sprint phone can get signal in most any city in all 50 states as well as most all highways. Unless the 3G rollout is on a massive scale it won't be able to compete and hence I won't be as likely to want it. A service is pretty useless if you can't get it in your area.

        Finally, one of the things I and many others I know value about our particular cells is they are small. My StarTAC, folded up isn't a whole lot bigger than a pager. Well if you try to whack a 160+ pixel LCD on a phone, it's going to get a lot bigger. Not something I want to lug around.

        I'm not saying 3G is necessiarly doomed to failure, but they have some issues to work out soon. The American and Japanese markets are NOT the same thing.
    • "No one honestly cares! Now, before you dismiss this as "troll", let's take an honest look at the situation:"

      You got that right. I've been tweaking computers since my 1979 Rev. 0 Apple ][+ (_with_ the amber monitor, mind you - tres cool...)

      I had to go to google to figure out what 3G meant in the first place. That generated a big, resounding "oh."

      Then again, I don't own an Aibo either, so I must be a geek-wanna-be. Can /. help me?
    • Here, here!

      Folk, its a telephone, for christ's sake. I wish that these marketing drones would eat a piece of the clue pie and realize that just becasue they can add a stupid feature does not mean that they must add that stupid feature. Have you ever tried "typing" using the numeric keypad of a phone? Its not worth the trouble.

      Forget about wireless internet, email, MP3 playing, etc, etc. Improve the phone so that it doesn't sound like I'm talking into a tin can. Please.

      Maybe, MAYBE if you could get a voice command system that would allow me to say, in plain English, commands for information to retreive (such as "How are my stocks doing today?"), that might be worth it. But you don't need a super high tech gadget to do that anyway.
      • Folk, its a telephone, for christ's sake. I wish that these marketing drones would eat a piece of the clue pie and realize that just becasue they can add a stupid feature does not mean that they must add that stupid feature.

        Agreed. Maybe the telcos should start reselling the idea of 3G without the word "phone" in there. Mobile Communications possibly. Mobile Multimedia... but they will still have to find people who need that. In 10 years time we will probably all be using 3G networks because compelling applications will have appeared by that time - requiring extensible OS devices and devices you can download apps onto.

        Have you ever tried "typing" using the numeric keypad of a phone? Its not worth the trouble.

        Heh, I've seen teenagers that can type on a mobile phone quicker than they can probably type on a normal keyboard. They can send messages without looking at the phone (e.g., in exams when the phone is in their pocket, etc).

        One of the popular mobile phones in this country is just a two-way pager device from Motorola with a built-in keyboard. A device designed for SMS basically. Small as well.

        Forget about wireless internet, email, MP3 playing, etc, etc. Improve the phone so that it doesn't sound like I'm talking into a tin can. Please.

        Yep. Make it thinner, smaller, higher resolution display, easier interface, longer battery life, better sound quality. This is what the mobile phone companies were doing in the 90's.

      • Folk, its a telephone ... Have you ever tried "typing" using the numeric keypad of a phone? Its not worth the trouble.

        Your post makes sense. It is logical, rational and Plain wrong.

        Consumers the world over have shown that text messages are a very good app for those mobile digital radio communication devices that we refer to as "telephones". And that they will put up with typing on a numeric keypad, message length limitations etc.

        Which is why the providers who failed to predict this are scrambling to lessen those limitations and anonnoyances in the hope that it will help them sell thier brand of electronic widgets and services.

    • No one honestly cares!

      Agreed. I don't care. I have a Motorola Triband phone in the UK (so I can use it in the US in supported areas, except I have never been to the US, so that was a waste of time) and it does what I want it to do, is a reasonable size (would like it to be shorter though), and does not have those willy mobile phone games on it.

      4 lines with maybe 25 characters each... nothing particularly special.

      That is an implementation problem. America and Europe are not technology hotbeds to be honest. In Japan they designed phones that have large colour screens and the like for their 3G networks. 160x160x16bit colour or better. Over here we get stuck with the standard 96x64x1bit phone screen. Apart from the Ericcson R380, which has a proper screen for a mobile phone, and does what I want a phone/mobile contacts device should do very well.

      I don't have a burning desire to check my e-mail from my mobile phone...

      I wouldn't mind SSH on a mobile phone. Oh, the Nokia Communicator! Shame that is a 2.5G device, but I bet it is being reengineered for the 3G world. That is a decent PDA with keyboard and integrated phone capabilities.

      Most every mobile provider offers quick messaging, and several of them DO offer e-mail to the phone.

      I can even send emails from the phone, using One2One in the UK. My phone is 2 years old. It doesn't do WAP. The emails are short - basically an SMS message sent to an SMS-email gateway. But it works. I have used it once. In two years.

      In the end, I want a smaller phone. With a higher-resolution screen, possibly greyscale as well, but no need for colour. A manner of putting my contacts on it, and my calendar, and possibly a couple of games for when I am stuck on the train without a book. Heh, ebooks as well. I don't need mp3. I don't need video. I want a usable interface. I don't need things which I need to make expensive calls on to use. I think I have just described the new Handspring devices...

      • The problem with the Nokia Communicator is that it's huge.

        I've got a Nokia 8890 and the main criteria for my next phone is that it must be no larger or heavier.

        Phones are now fashion accessories and consumers are not going to accept big bricks of phones regardless of what wonderful 3G services they provide.

        • Yes, your next phone.

          Personally, if I had a Nokia communicator, I would use it on my lap as a tiny-computer, and use handfree for the mobile aspect. Now if oonly the phone had a little spindle inside of it for the handfree wire to automatically retract inside the phone when not in use....

  • Yes, 3G might be very nice. But you can already have streaming multimedia in 2G. You just need the right technology.

    And the right technology is at: www.activesky.com

  • 3G is not just more bits and bytes.... (Score:4, Interesting)

    by kzharv ( 175360 ) on Tuesday October 30, 2001 @01:51AM (#2496038)
    The article misses some of the points of what 3G is about. 3G was developed to be a converging path of current technologies to integrate them in a more practical way.
    Currently there is almost a different standard for each region / country on the planet.... where is the sense in this?
    3G allows technologies based on TDMA/ GSM and those based on CDMA / IS-95b to meet somewhere.
    IS-136 derived technologies will merge to WCDMA/UWC-136 and IS-95b derived technologies will merge to cdma2000/3xrtt.
    Handsets that are 3G capable should be able to work with any 3G network through mediation carried out at the base station.
    The added bandwidth, whilst integral to the standard, is only one part of it. This defiantly was not addressed 3G was called a dog.

    bleh whatever....

    I would rather a full bottle in front of me than a full frontal lobotomy
    • I believe the original quote is

      "I'd rather have a bottle in front of me than a frontal lobotomy"

      - Groucho Marx

      One of my favorites...thanks for reminding me of it!

  • So, what's new? (Score:3, Insightful)

    by ukryule ( 186826 ) <slashdot@yule . o rg> on Tuesday October 30, 2001 @04:53AM (#2496192) Homepage
    So, Negroponte doesn't like 3G? Has he got any good reasons for this, or is he just jumping on the "I hate 3G" bandwagon and hoping to get a bit of publicity? The man's logic is so deranged, it's a bit hard to tell ...

    Again, they have lost a lot of money on 3G for reasons that had nothing to do with the marketing side of 3G.

    3G licenses were sold (marketed) at the peak of the hype (marketing) about 3G being the "next big thing". Telecom companies paid billions, the market collapsed and these companies end up with big overdrafts. Bug**r all to do with the technology, quite a bit to do with marketing.

    It had to do with the terrible mistake made here in the UK over the auction process that was copying a bad American idea and repeating it here.

    An auction isn't a way to market something?
    Granted, the UK auction process was a mistake. In particular it was designed to make money for the government (which it did very well), instead of to boost a developing technology ... the method? Auction off N licenses when you know that there are at least N+1 (at the time, very rich) companies who need a license to stay in business. Noone dares to drop out of the auction process, so the prices spiral.

    It's a dog and people shouldn't want it and in fact I don't think it will see the light of day.

    So this is the nub of his argument? "It's a dog"? Any reason for saying this? Technical justifications? Nope. Just "It's a dog" ... profound insight!

    With that as a backdrop, (Conclusive proof that it's a dog) the truth is that what consumers want is a logarithmic scale.

    You can currently get 9.6k over GSM. 3G gives you (at least) 144k. So he *does* like 3G after all! Either that or he doesn't know what he's talking about.

    3G doesn't even exist. Some people might argue that it'll come in a year or two years (don't think the Japanese have it, that's not 3G).

    Ah! That clears up whether he knows what he's talking about or not. Who's going to tell NTT DoCoMo that there 3G system isn't Negroponte-compliant? What about the Korean mobile networks who implemented a 2.5G system and found that it actually worked well enough to be classified as 3G?

    The sad part, and this isn't being discussed enough, is that it's no good.

    The sad part is that attention-hungry half-informed talking heads like Negroponte continually hype up new technology to ridiculous levels, for others to talk it down the following year. It's happened with Internet services, WAP, Bluetooth and now 3G. It confuses the public and discredits the industry - but it makes good headlines.

    3G is a new technology which is evolving from 2G (well, duh!). Will it be implemented? Yes. Will it be successful? That depends on whether people find enough uses for it ...
    Just like when the internet started noone knew what it will really be used for. Just like the internet, the closest thing to a 'killer app' is already available (email for the net, voice calls for 3G). Unlike the internet it's been hyped to heaven and hell before it's been born.

    3G does need informed discussion, it doesn't need Negroponte.

    • The UK auction went wrong either cos the bidders had never been to auctions before, or because they were incapable of running a business.

      In order for the customers (phone users) to pay for the licences, they would have had to spend their entire incomes, and then some, on phone bills for several years. Part of your business plan has to be to figure out whether the customers CAN pay.

      As part of my sales training, I was told about an allegedly famous American bank robber, called Willie Sutton. Apparently, when he was arrested, the judge asked "Willie, your an intelligent man, why do you rob banks?" To which he replied "Hell, man, thats where the money is! ... no point in robbing candy stores."

      Unfortunately the people who run BT did not have the extensive sales training that I got!

      Or they did not know how many millions in a billion.

      Either way, they should not have been in charge of anthing bigger than a mobile phone.
  • NN:It's not where the lies come from - whether it's a silly website or a recognised authority - it's the absence of the filters. That's why again a more popular kind of filtering, where the people looking at the information can actually help filter it, is a very, very important approach for the future. It's not done very much but it could solve issues of pornography, it could solve credibility issues of the kind you just mentioned.

    OK, an interview like this is probably not the place to expect a well thought out solution to the filtering problem, but this is another in a series of vague unsupported ideas he throws out there. What does this mean? How would this system work? It's easy to say that "popular kind of filtering, where the people looking at the information can actually help filter it" is a good idea, but are there any difficulties with it? Why hasn't it been implemented already? Let's hear it, Negroponte, that would be more interesting than throwaway platitudes.

  • Q: You say digital technology will end the nation state and eventually produce a global cyber state. Now, speaking at this moment, that looks particularly wrong, doesn't it? You have a war being fought in defence of states; you have people who don't have states - Muslims and Palestinians - saying can we have a nation state, please? So, that prediction has turned out to be very wrong.

    A: No, actually, it's turned out to be quite right. Let me explain how. Clearly, the notion of a piece of land, definable - these are atoms and they have an edge and a limiting contour - as something that you relate to as a culture or as an individual is extraordinarily important. What's happened is that the nation state as we know it today happens to be the wrong size. It's too big to be local and it's too small to be global; the UK is a perfect example.

    For a better answer to this question, try reading Spiral Dynamics [spiraldynamics.com] [www.spiraldynamics.com].

    Spiral Dynamics theory concerns itself with what people and nations value, and according to SD there are about seven or eight basic value systems, or 'value MEMEs' that operate in people.

    Each vMEME is colour coded for ease of reference--they are (very basically):

    BEIGE: vaues instinctual basic survival eg. homeless people, starving masses
    PURPLE: values ethnic tribes, family and mythic rituals, eg. superstitions, corporate 'tribes'
    RED: values power, impulsivity, egocentricity, and rebelling, eg. streetgangs, frontier mentality, James Bond villains
    BLUE: values conformance, absolutist principles of 'right' and 'wrong', Order, and the One True Way, eg. Puritan America, Confucian China, Islamic fundamentalism
    ORANGE: values achievement, escape from the 'herd', the world is a chessboard and you play to Win, eg. Wall Street, Colonialism
    GREEN: values sensitivity, communitarian human bonding, dialogue, relationships, multiculturalism, eg. Postmodernism, Greenpeace
    YELLOW: values integration of all of the above, as life is a kaliedoscope of natural hierarchies, systems and forms.

    So even with this very rough map of the different vMEMEs, we can tentatively see that the USA is predominantly an ORANGE (personal achievement, we protect our interestes) oriented culture, but also has a significant percentage of the GREEN (no culture is better than any other, USA is an oppressor) vMEME active.

    Contrast that with other parts of the world that are still firmly set in BLUE--there is One True Way, Our God is the Only God, our culture is Good and it's order must be preserved.

    Or even parts of Africa that value the tribe and where lines of kinship are considered very important (PURPLE).

    And applying our vMEME map to the current conflict, it would seem that the Taliban is an unhealthy mixture of the BLUE 'our religion is True,' vMEME with the RED power striving vMEME (and we'll personally take power, commit terrorist acts, and kill any of our people who disagree with us).

    And remember that many people devote maybe half their lives guided by whichever vMEME is operating in them, be it ORANGE achievement or BLUE conformity.

    And yet, we're somehow supposed to believe that, given enough mobile phones, our differences are going to dissapear and we're going to form a Global Cyber State?

    It's difficult to see how digitally connecting everyone on the outside is somehow going to make the differences on the inside dissapear.

    Imagine a student phoning a terrorist:

    Western student (GREEN): let's talk, for I aknowledge and respect your culture...
    Arab extreemist (RED/blue): You are not of my culture, you are an infidel--die infidel, Die!!

    Perhaps the trouble with Dr. Negroponte's answer is that he's looking, like a good technologist, from the outside, at the physical systems, and talking about stuff ilke 'the size of the state being wrong'.

    But by using SD we can start to fathom the depth and breadth of the inner codes and values that are operating in people and nations, and why the conflict exists not just between states but also between the different vMEMEs operating within single states.

    eg.:
    'they attacked us and we are just in punishing them' (BLUE),
    'we have to protect our oil interests and stabilise the area' (ORANGE),
    'America is oppressive and interfering with minority cultures' (GREEN)

    • Colour me brown, for I contain multitudes, and will speak with all.

      Saying that people are one colour or another and no shade in between is like believing your horoscope. Comforting, perhaps, but utter bollocks.

      • Saying that people are one colour or another and no shade in between is like believing your horoscope. Comforting, perhaps, but utter bollocks.

        Sorry, that's something I should have made clear. Most of the vMEMEs can be present in a person, and they actually form a sort of spiral, where if someone is operating from BLUE, it means they already have within them RED, PURPLE and BEIGE.

        A person may operate out of ORANGE at work, GREEN with their spouse, BLUE with their children, and BEIGE when they get hungry.

        So it's not that a person is BLUE, but that they are operating out of BLUE.

        But while many vMEMEs may be present in a person, one vMEME may dominate, and as such, direct most of a person's life and purpose. America has a strong percentage of ORANGE achievement vMEME--a lot of what America is about is clustered around this vMEME. All the other vMEMEs are present as well, but not as strongly.

        As for the horoscope, these vMEMEs were not just invented by someone with nothing to do. They were discovered, starting with when a psychologist called Dr. Graves asked his students to write essays describing what they thought a 'healthy person' was.

        The breadth of answers he got indicated that there were some distictly different values floating around--something which he and his colleagues researched, over many years, into what's now known as Spiral Dynamics.

        SD was practically used to help diffuse conflict and bring an end to Aparetheid in South Africa, by allowing the different factions to recognise what vMEME they were operating from.

        So yes, there are mixtures, and as I said in the original post, the Taliban may be a mixture of RED power-drive with BLUE fundamentalism. Of course they still eat (BEIGE), but then you don't see them opening shops or preaching about ecological disaster (ORANGE and GREEN respectively).

        So while a person may have most vMEMEs in them, they might use only one or two most of the time. You could check this by yourself, for example, using a sort of test question: 'Should there be compulsory AIDS tests for the whole population?' -- the answers you get will tend to reflect a particular vMEME:

        'Yes, as only immoral people are likely to get aids, and we should know who they are' (BLUE?),

        'No! nobody messes with me or tests me or tells me what to do' (RED?),

        'Our heritage is pure, so only backward foreign cultures should be tested' (PURPLE?),

        'No, for they will then become an oppressed minority' (GREEN?),

        'Yes, so that the real extent of the problem can be known and we can all see that the it isn't just gays that get it, but so called respectable white people too' (GREEN again?)

        'We should make it compulsory that health and wellbeing is better taught in schools, so that our future generation may test themselves out of their own will, and so that anonymously gathered statistics be made available so that we can better plan the expenditure requirements for our health infrastructure' (YELLOW?)
        -- these examples are my own

        The authors of the SD book, Chris Cowan and Dr. Don Beck, go to great lengths to say that they work the theory to be 'as simple as possible, but no simpler' -- they recognise the power of getting the map down to the most useful degree of detail. It's just my fault for over-simplifying SD for a quick /. post. Heck, I only read the book.

  • "It's not where the lies come from - whether it's a silly website or a recognised authority - it's the absence of the filters. That's why again a more popular kind of filtering, where the people looking at the information can actually help filter it, is a very, very important approach for the future. It's not done very much but it could solve issues of pornography, it could solve credibility issues of the kind you just mentioned."

    Well I thought it sounded like one of my projects so thought it might be of interest to someone else..

    Open image directory software: http://mlug.missouri.edu/~mogmios/projects/kigdemo .html
  • I fail to see how the Digital Age (as it is) would have any particulary profound effect on national states. They are out and digital is in, but it's all a coincidence. The nation states are going to disappear because they are a bad idea.

    I guess every group of people have to try it out for themselves and they should be allowed to do so without exception (would you please wake up Middle East, he's sleeping again during the class).

    Sure, digital stuff will have profound effect on many things, even how societies organized but I'm just saying that national states aren't alone in this regard, and in fact would come to an end with or without anything digital.

    And I agree with the interviewed pundit that one of the things into which national states are going to change is the local state, a small and governable group of people in a smallish piece of land. A local state may be ethnically homogenous but that is not it's main defining feature.

    Btw, phones aren't just phones. I really want at least two, possibly three phones with different qualities.
    • First a workphone which should be a optimally usable phone for voice communication without many fancy features. SMS/email-like features are a must. Games a bonus (you don't know how often I have an hour to kill.)
    • Secoundly I want a party/nighttime phone. Small, fancy looking. Either durable or cheep. Voice and SMS. Must have battery-life of 72 hours or more (friday morning thru monday morning).
    • The third is all-out computer-phone hybrid. I want one. I don't know what it should do exactly, but I want it. Gimme one I will find ways of using it. Why should I know what it should do yet? Never had one or even anything near it.

    Point to the list is that there can be more then one uberphone. It's like which one is the better ballplayer His Airness or ZZ? (Of course Jordan is possibly the greatest athlete ever, but that is more then made up by the images of fierce troll warrior-god.)

    --Flam,
    who publicly predicted that the Dutch would win the World Cup a day before they are knocked out by the Irish.

  • It seems the fate of many new technologys goes something like this:
    1) Hyped
    2) Introduced
    3) Debunked
    4) Used
    5) Taken for granted

    (Of course, the process is not entirely linear.)

    At the moment, a lot of people are debunking 3G,
    a natural response to the hype. As there are no
    phones on the market as of yet, it's too early to
    say what will happen.

    It's likely the people will, in fact, use 3G but
    maybe not in the way intended.
    (Much as the european phone companies had no idea
    that SMS messaging would be a major future source
    of revenue when the GSM standard was introduced)

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