This presentation was given as the closing keynote at Metaswitch Forum 2012 in Orlando, FL on 4th October 2012.

It solely contains the opinions of Martin Geddes, and has not been endorsed by Metaswitch. Nonetheless, many thanks to Metaswitch for the speaking opportunity. Much appreciated.

Martin Geddes
www.martingeddes.com mail@martingeddes.com
2012 Martin Geddes Consulting Ltd. Do unto others

A presentation about

Hypervoice
Specifically, how voice joins the constellation of web hypermedia, alongside text and images.

The presentation starts by looking at the past of voice, then the future, before returning to the present.

NOW

Past

Future

Telco

The present is very confusing, because we are seeing the collision of two conflicting sets of values and ideas.

? ?

CONFUSION

I am putting forward a hypothesis as to what emerges from that confusion.

Web

For telcos, there is increasing dissonance between the values, beliefs and behaviours that made them successful, and the current reality.

Convergence

Fragmentation

The emphasis on interoperation, federation, standards, vertical integration doesnt fit with the reality of fragmentation of voice.

NOW

POTS

PSTN + PLMN + Just a feature Public SIP of the Cloud, Interconnect System Web and Apps + Skype + Xbox +

As is readily seen from current trends.

Three

big future changes

Reconciliation with reality requires three big shifts.

User experience 2. Business model 3. Network technology

1.

Lets start with the trajectory of telcos.

Telco

PAST

And go back to basics and the very beginning.

What is voice

Talk at a distance

This is both trivial and profound, as talking at a distance is subtly different in many ways to talking to those physically present.

So, what do you do for a living?

We take this everyday wonder for granted. We shouldnt! So next time someone asks you what you do

Work for the phone company

So, what do you do for a living?

You can do better than that!

Network equipment vendor

Sorry, even less cool!

Illusionist!
The correct answer is that you are an illusionist. You conjure up the ghostly voice of someone from hundreds or thousands of miles away, and trick people into believing a real person is present. My Daddy is an ILLUSIONIST! Whats yours?

Presence

This illusion has a name. It is called cognitive absorption. The guy on the left isnt falling for the trick hes just rubbing his ear with a lump of plastic.

Weve been performing this trick for a long time. So long, that voice and telephony have become virtually synonymous.

When telephony was new, phone companies had to teach people what to say; a new language of etiquette.

Telephony has an unconscious inner language, a bit like a game of chess, with standard opening gambits, middle game and endings.

This book from the mid 1990s studies hundreds of calls and documents that language.

A critical feature of telephony is the power the caller has over the caller; both in choice of timing, and the control of subject matter when the call is answered. There is an innate social imbalance.

Hegemony of the caller

And all these features were built in a very different era, for different users, with different expectations, by a very different kind of ecosystem.

As an example, consider the toll free number, introduced by fiat under the old AT&T long distance regime.

Assumes our time is cheap and calls are expensive

labor

telephony
A minute of labor cost less than a minute of long distance telephony.

This implicitly assumes calls are expensive. After all, what else would the phone company desire!

Equalized between c.1982-2000

labor

In c. 1982 you could hire a college graduate at parity per minute with fixed-line long distance calls.

telephony

By 2000, even a mobile minute was cheaper than hiring a high school graduate for 60 seconds.

Today

labor

telephony

$
Today, labor far exceeds the cost of telephony. It is our time that is scarce, not our machinery of talk.

Telco social contract

Universal

service Emergency lifeline Legal intercept

However, that system left behind many critical social services and systems that need to be preserved as part of our society.

Telco World
Service-centric
Plus an extraordinarily successful system that has served to connect billions of people around the world. Hurrah for telcos!

Telco device Telco access Telco service

Network roaming

So lets roll forward to the present.

PRESENT

Telcos exist in co-opetition with over the top (OTT) players for services revenue.

Telco World
Service-centric
Telco device Telco access Telco service Network roaming

OTT World
Experience-centric
Any combination of device, access and service* Experience roaming

* Supported within any one ecosystem

Corrosion

ARBITRAGE

COMPETITION REGULATION

The three horsemen of the telepocalypse

The temptation is to retreat to an undergound safe place in Nebraska. This is not a good long-term lifestyle choice.

Off-net apps are the new mobile coverage

ACCESS
COVERAGE
So if you cant beat them, join them.

CLOUD

SERVICE
COVERAGE

CLOUD

However, the Internet cannot and never will carry societys real-time communications needs. It is fundamentally unsuited to the job.

Telco World
Service-centric
Telco device Telco access Telco service Network roaming

Telco-OTT World
Product-centric
Mixture of telco and 3rd party devices, access and services

OTT World
Experience-centric
Any combination of device, access and service* Experience roaming

?
Which is giving rise to a hybrid model of service delivery.
* Supported within any one ecosystem

NGN Fixed
Recreating a VoIP PSTN

4G Mobile
Voice over LTE = Telephony over LTE
So telcos are left in a groundhog day forever re-creating telephony, rather than moving forwards.

How do I do cloud voice

So the telco challenge is to find a model of cloud voice that works both technically and economically.

Lets go look at the parallel evolution of the web and hypermedia.

Web

PAST

Again, well go right back to the beginning.

What a computer is to me is its the most remarkable tool that weve ever come up with, and its the equivalent of a

bicycle for our minds.

Computer folk start with a different mind-set. Networks arent about telephones and telegraphs, but about connecting computers.

Steve Jobs

Ideas

And specifically, they see computers as effort amplifiers for spreading ideas.

HYPERLINK 1.0

Documents get URLs

doc doc
A PLACE METAPHOR
And as ideas naturally are expressed via documents, these are amplified via hyperlinks.

Documents

Homepages

Blogs

Which gave rise to this world. (With blogs being a stepping stone to the next phase of the Webs evolution.)

WEB 1.0

Hypertext
So the first edition of the Web was based on hypertext, and had minimal impact on telcos bar creating demand for dial-up and broadband access.

MINIMAL IMPACT ON VOICE SOME IMPACT ON FAX

HYPERLINK 2.0

Events get URLs

doc event
A STREAM METAPHOR
The world moved on. We came up with a new metaphor. The granularity of linking dropped. We started recording and pointing to individual events.

Tags

Status @pointers updates #tags

There was an explosion of use and innovation based on this new stream metaphor.

Images

WEB 2.0

Social web
Which we gave a name to, as it amplified our ability to relate.

WEB 2.0

Hypermessaging
Because in retrospect we had invented a new hypermedium.

SIGNIFICANT IMPACT ON SMS

Thoughts

Which amplified individual thoughts.

PRESENT

So lets roll forward to the present.

 Add new

binary medium to browsers using a place metaphor Assume it just works on the Internet Everyone will figure out how to use it

The web folk are just as stuck as the telcos in accommodating voice! Just in a different way.

With their current approach being useful, but neither necessary nor sufficient to make voice a native of hypermedia.

This standard lets web browsers send and receive real-time audio and video.

How do I do cloud voice

So the same question applies to the web how to bring voice into our integrated online experience, rather than existing as a parallel universe.

Telco
CONFUSION

And that is why we find ourselves in a very confusing place.

Web

So how can we resolve that confusion as we plunge into the future?

FUTURE

Cloud text?

Hypertext
A simple observation points the way. Whilst we talk of cloud voice, we dont talk of cloud text. Its hypertext.

Cloud voice?

Hypervoice
So the resolution is to make voice into a native hypermedium, through understanding its intrinsic linking properties.

VOICE, WEB VOICE, HYPERVOICE

That means transcending the limits of web voice as currently conceived, and instead moving to hypervoice.

HYPERVOICE

Links what we say to what we do

Just as we now routinely digitally capture our words and images, we will capture our voices. Voice need no longer be ephemeral.

Memories

Which makes hypervoice an amplifier for our working memories.

Everything linked by time

Notes you take Slides you show Screens you share Messages you send Web pages you browse Documents you open Customer records you view Sales opportunities you edit Trouble tickets you close

WEB 3.0

Hypervoice
TRANSCENDS TELEPHONY

HYPERLINK 3.0

Voice gestures get URLs

event event
A TEMPORAL METAPHOR
The web gets a new linking structure, one based on time. Humans arent nearly as intuitive at managing temporal metaphors as they are at spatial ones.

Magician!
So hypervoice upgrades us from illusionists to magicians. Daddy youre a MAGICIAN too! How cool!

As we can time travel as easily as we space travel.

Why should you care?

Your 20th century network voice product has to compete against

21st century cloud rivals

Three

big future changes

User experience 2. Business model 3. Network technology

1.

For example, computers will help us to rendezvous. The phone call will become the offer or request.

Hegemony of the caller

Audio will be recorded locally as well as send in real-time, given audio make-up, and the pristine result uploaded in perfect replica.

Three

big future changes

User experience 2. Business model 3. Network technology

1.

Just as the move from text to hypertext gave rise to Google-like business models that remove friction, hypervoice will enable new disruptive revenue models.

ENTERPRISES

Conversation Gap

PUBLIC

The money will be in making ordinary, everyday business interactions more efficient, effective and secure internally and externally.

Example: Fonolo

An example today is Fonolo, which enables hypervoice deep-links into IVRs, using your smartphone.

Three

big future changes

User experience 2. Business model 3. Network technology

1.
Networks are just large distributed supercomputers; the wires and radios are the processor interconnects. But you knew that anyway

DEDICATED NETWORK

Previously we have had - the fixed/mobile voice networks (effective and efficient, but inflexible) - the Internet (efficient and flexible, but ineffective for real-time)

Monoservice network

These are single class of service networks. Kind of like the networking equivalent of black and white photography.

IMS + SBC WORLD

These are the kinds of technologies telcos use to deliver voice services over Internet Protocol

We are building a world that is effective and flexible, if somewhat inefficient.

Monoservice overlays

So weve now got multiple shades of sepia.

We do this via isolating flows using overlays.

CLOUD WORLD

The future will require us to learn how to multiplex everything together much better.

Polyservice networks

Which means multiple classes of service; possibly even one unique to every flow! Kodachrome networks!

Effective Flexible Efficient

Because we will need all three properties to deliver a completely unified real-time world of distributed computing.

WERE NEARLY DONE

CLOSING THOUGHTS

Technological Revolutions & Financial Capital

Carlota Perez
Electricity, Steel & Heavy Engineering Steam, Coal, Iron, Railways

IT & Telecoms
? Biotech, Nanotech

Oil, Petrochemicals & Automobiles

1770

2012

The Turning Point

Each revolution has a period of around 70 years where we work out how stuff works.

Then a bubble and financial collapse, social disorder.

Technology becomes modular, reliable and invisible.

Purpose-for-fitness
Example: farms bought one motor, and lots of adapters. Transistor in 1940s.

Fitness-for-purpose
Finally there is a golden age, as society re-organises around the technology and reaps the benefits.
Example: your toothbrush has a micro-motor.

The Turning Point

Voice as network service

Voice as cloud function

Voice becomes as invisible and innate to your online experience as the motor in your toothbrush is to your waking-up experience.

Telco

Focuses on containing failure modes of applications. What telcos have always done.

Packaged Cloud Services

CONFUSION

Web

Experimental systems that trial new success modes. Even wilder than the Internet is today.

Libreville

NOW
Back to the present

Past

Future

Universal Service Fund, Inter-carrier Compensation, shutting down the old fixed network

USF, ICC, PSTN transition?

Same issues in 19th century. Roads changed the model, obsoleted these issues. Our roads are internet, cloud, cognitive radios, community networks.

Railroads vs roads
The railroad regulator is out of business, the railroads are not. The telecoms regulator largely exists to perpetuate problems it was invented to resolve a century ago.

Focus on the

customer
not the regulator
Else youll go down together.

What do you need to do?

1.
2. 3. 4. 5.

Understand hypervoice future. Get cloudy for service delivery. Buy network flexibility. Import inventive services. Export successful services.

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