Alec Saunders SquawkBox

The biggest story to hit the telecom world in a while, in my opinion, is Facebook’s decision to go XMPP with their chat client.  I think it means a ton for SIP/Simple, for developers and the IM Gulag perpetuated by Microsoft, Yahoo and AOL.  So we talked about it on the SquawkBox.  Some conclusions:

Given the sheer number of Facebook users in the market, and the failure of Microsoft, Yahoo and AOL to open up their clouds to SIMPLE, is this the nail in the coffin for SIMPLE?  Answer: Probably.

With popular XMPP clients like Does XMPP beat the big MSFT YHOO AOL at the IM game over the long term? Answer: maybe.

A lot of us thought that a presence cloud would be part of the telecom infrastructure.  Now it looks as if it might live outside the infrastructure. Answer: Probably.

We also talked about the rumoured TouchScreen BlackBerry that has surfaced on the Boy Genius Report.  Reportedly it will be a Verizon exclusive.  Seems like a smart move on RIM’s part — a counter to Apple’s iPhone Mo.

On the call: Jeb Brilliant, Andy Abramson, Jim Courtney, James Body, Brad Jones, Jeanette Fisher, Ian Hood, Bill Volk, Tom Howe and Todd Spraggins.

 

 Squawk Box May 14 [28:12m]: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

It’s popular to talk about how VoIP means the “death of distance”.  Because IP flattens networks, Voice on IP rides “distance unaware” to basically any place on the planet.  Flat Planet Phone Company CEO Moshe Maeir knows this better than anyone, having just sold a call center to the UAW in support of the US Democratic Party… from his home base in Israel.  VoIP extensions were used to connect folks in Indiana back to their headquarters in NY.

Nicely done Moshe!

Those cagey guys at Facebook are about to do something which nobody else in the last five years has been able to do.  They’re about to crown Jabber/XMPP the king of IM protocols, and in the process they may finally crack the hegemony that AOL, Microsoft and Yahoo have enjoyed in the IM market for the last decade.

The news is that Facebook has announced that Facebook Chat will become XMPP compliant.  In theory that means you can take a client like iChat on the Mac, or GTalk from Google and make it speak to Facebook chat.  And Facebook is where the eyeballs are moving to today.

Example: as I write this at 5:30 AM, I have 30 contacts online on Skype, 29 on Facebook, 6 on MSN, and 2 on GTalk.  GTalk, for all its promise, is little more than a persistent twitter window for me.  I started on MSN, but for a long time, Skype has been my primary IM. Skype is where the people are.  Increasingly, Facebook is becoming a Skype replacement for text chat.

To place all of this in context: Skype, Yahoo, MSN, and AOL are proprietary closed IM protocols.  There has been a tug of war for some time in the industry between two open standards — XMPP and SIP/SIMPLE.  Neither has won out, despite the fact that the telecom industry understands that presence is a huge step forward.  With Facebook’s endorsement of XMPP, however, that could all change.  Their 70 million plus audience is about to become completely presence enabled in a standard way, paving the way for a true social directory for all communications networks.

And, as I wrote 18 months ago in New Presence, this is happening off network.   To be valuable, a presence cloud needs to be open and exist separate from the carriers.

Users live lives outside the artificially constructed walled gardens of the network operators, and so must their presence.  Therefore, New Presence assumes a user-centric model of presence rather than a network-centric model. New Presence by its nature must be an off-carrier platform as it is dependent on the ability of users to assert identity, catalog relationships, and gather contextual information across multiple networks.

I’m going to paraphrase Andy Abramson, because his analysis, although thorough, is also darn long.  Andy has combined two of the big stories of the last week — the rumoured Skype killer under development by a consortium of carriers, and the Clearwire / Sprint Wimax announcement – and concluded that it’s really the latter who have the opportunity (in conjunction with their cable partners) to build a strong competitor to Skype.  Moreover, with this next gen WiMax network, they might also be able to drive a nail through the hearts of the incumbents.

Hrrrmmm.  I guess I’m in the Ken Camp camp on this one. It’s too damn late.  Expecting these folks to really get it together and figure out how to do this is … a stretch.  There’ll be be kosher pork at the grocery before something this unlikely happens.

Besides, to borrow from Andy, this is a me-also play, not a me different.  WiMax is fast (max 70 Mb/s), but not a lot faster than HSPA (42 Mb/s down, 11.5 Mb/s up).  Because it’s symmetrical, WiMax is well suited to backbone applications, but really doesn’t confer a lot of benefit on the end point.

So video calling?  Sure.  But you can do the same on HSPA. 500kb/s required — not 11.5 Mb/s. And carriers like Rogers are already doing it.

No, to really really change the game would require a leap of imagination that I don’t think Clearwire / Sprint possesses.  WiMax is symmetrical high speed.  Imagine a pure peer sharing network instead. Something like the TerraNet system — Skype style p2p for communications, and bittorrent style p2p for content distribution. Mesh it so you don’t have to build out a massive infrastructure.  Price the whole thing at a flat rate for access only, and sit back and watch the destruction of 125 years of legacy telecom.

That’s a me different.  That’s a game changer.  And it’s something that no carrier or content provider has the cojones to execute on.

It’s been a busy day for me, as I got up early in Toronto to rehearse a speech I’ve been writing for the University of Toronto MET Executive Development Program. Composed mostly of Canadian wireless carriers, this was an audience that I had been hoping to address for some time, and a market which, if you’ve been a reader of this blog, you know I have strong opinions about. The speech went well, and I’ll have more to say about tomorrow.

Our Squawk Box discussion was serendipitously on the topic of deep packet inspection, as CIPPIC launched a case this morning against Bell Canada alleging a violation of privacy through the use of deep packet inspection. What followed was one of the most cogent arguments for privacy and net neutrality I’ve heard in a long time. Pay particular attention to the points made by Dave Brown and Frank Abrams. Frank Abrams, in particular, says “just meter the pipes and sell me the bandwidth I use, but don’t inspect my data.”

We also spent some time digging through the Google Friend Connect announcement, but because so few people had spent enough time with it we’ll have to save this for another day.

On the call: James Body, Jeanette Fisher, Jim Courtney, Dave Brown, Jonathan Jensen, Brad Jones, Julien Raynal, Adam Somer, Ian Hood, Ken Camp, Sheryl Breuker, Frank Abrams, Paul Newcombe and Barry Sullivan.

Enjoy

 

 Squawk Box May 13 [27:47m]: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download