Video Recording of “Beyond Neutrality – Enabling a World of Connected Things” talk at a joint meeting of the IEEE CE, Communications and Computer Societies and the ACM.
(Click to Watch)This article is based on the talk I gave at a joint meeting of the IEEE CE, Communications and Computer Societies and the ACM. It is based on my Connectivity Policy essay as well as the column I wrote for the IEEE/CE Magazine.

The growing interest in the “Internet of Things” is forcing us to think beyond the web to a much larger world of connected devices. We can tolerate the many barriers to connectivity because we expect that someone can provide the necessary credentials to log in to the providers’ services and to adjust Wi-Fi access keys whenever the access point changes or simply to click “agree” at a hotspot.

This doesn’t work for “things” which can’t recognize a sign-on or “agree screen”. This may not be obvious at first because it’s easy to demonstrate an automated house if you set “things” up just right and don’t change anything but the illusion quickly disappears after the cameras are turned off and real people try to live in the home. Many of the wearables on the market stop working as soon as you walk away from your phone or change phones.

A New Paradigm

The Internet represents a fundamental shift from thinking about services inside a network to services created outside the network by users with their intelligent (AKA programmable) devices. By using the intelligence in our devices we are able to create solutions that do not depend on a provider.

VoIP works by taking advantage of opportunities and as the capacity of the Internet grows (thanks to applications like the web) high quality voice with video become more likely. In the talk I cite an IEEE article on VoLTE (Voice over LTE) which depends on every carrier in the path doing the right thing—very old paradigm.

This is why it is important to understand what I call the three stages of digital. With telegraphy we could carry messages over any distance but the introduction of analog telephony made distance difficult and required a different infrastructure for each kind of content.

In the second stage communication technology addressed this issue by encoding the analog signal digitally. As with any new technology it emulated the old technology and its business model. More subtly, it kept the assumption that speech was maintained within channels and could be measured in bits. We assumed that communications in the sense of “speech” and communications as a technology were the same.

Today we are in the third generation of digital in which we use intelligent devices to create our own solutions without depending on providers. We are no longer emulating the old phone networks.

Yet the assumptions of analog telephony are still implicit in today’s polices even as the intelligence is in our devices rather than in the network and speech is no longer confined to channels. Communications technology and communications as speech are no longer the same.

Policies

Our public policies have yet to catchup with this fundamental change. The very term “Federal Communications Commission” shows the confusion between the technology and speech. Existing regulations continue to be based on old paradigm and assume that speech is contained within channels (wires and frequency bands). The business model of telecommunications depends on carriers making a profit by using their expensive infrastructures to assure the delivery of content as if it were freight.

This framing of speech as freight is the reason we seek to extend common carrier rules in the form of network neutrality. And, indeed, to the extent that we rely on carriers we need rules to assure they play fair.

But the world has changed and with the Internet we no longer depend on carriers. As we connect “things” there is no “content” as such—just devices exchanging packets.

This has always been true with the Internet but as long as we see the Internet through the lens of the web it seems as if it’s the next iteration of the phone network. Connected things force us to confront the mismatch between the carrier-centric view and one in which value is created in devices.

Broadband Infrastructure

If we look up at the poles in our cities we can see the television-age technology with a separate analog pipe going to each house. No wonder it is expensive and difficult to maintain this infrastructure.

Yet the power of the Internet comes from our ability to think about the relationships between devices with nothing between the two end points. The value is now created using the networks and not by owning them.

Even more of a problem for the current business of broadband is that there is no longer any differentiation between services. In this illustration (see image on the right) all it takes to switch between Comcast and Verizon is unplugging the white Ethernet wire and replacing it with the red wire. There is no essential difference!

With HBO and CBS announcing that they are going to be offering their content, as Netflix and Hulu do, without requiring a cable TV contract, we’re going to be forced to come to terms with a new landscape.

All our devices are now simply computers. This is a diagnostic screen (see box below) from my Verizon Set Top Box (Arris VMS1100).

It reminds us that indeed the STB is just another computer. It’s time we recognized the reality and move from a Federal Communications Commission to a Department of Connectivity that focuses on infrastructure. Other federal agencies (such as the FTC) would be responsible for what we do with the technologies.

Paying for our Infrastructure

This common infrastructure would be like roads and sidewalks, funded as a common infrastructure. The idea that each wire must be a profit center doesn’t work because the value is in the whole and not the parts.

We’re not going to see people embrace this approach without examples. Instead of focusing on cities we need to start from places where a small number of people can cooperate such as an apartment house or housing developments (Known as Multiple Dwelling Units or MDUs) where a small group of individual or a single owner can set policy.

We have real world examples such as “Castle Village” in NYC and other living groups where people pool their resources to pay for common infrastructure and for a single fat “broadband” pipe.

These connected zones will set examples for the future. These zones serve as the seed for wider connectivity and at some point we’re going to see such common connectivity as the norm.

Mobile and the Internet

The Internet architecture needs to evolve. There isn’t a mobile and an immobile Internet. The relationships between end points shouldn’t be dependent upon where they are at any given moment. The accidental history of the Internet going back to the days of large mainframes has left us with a legacy of expedient design decisions.

We assumed machines didn’t move around much. They stayed in the same place or “address” so we didn’t need to distinguish between their network address and the machine identifier. The IP address could serve both roles. As machines became more mobile this no longer made sense.

The legacy of “long distance” being difficult has led us to focus on accessing distant web sites as a prime example of what we could do with connectivity.

For connected things we need an architecture which is about relationships that are indifferent to place and what’s between the two end points. We need to avoid central dependencies. If I want to turn on the light in my house I shouldn’t need to be connected to the DNS just to find the address of my door lock and the ability to control the lights in my house shouldn’t be dependent upon a single hub working perfectly year after year.

The most mobile devices tend to be small so we use the term mobile as a shorthand for programming for small screens. This is just one possible form factor and not mobility.

By recognizing making this assumptions explicit we can rethink our “givens” and move on to take advantage of connectivity. We can look beyond neutral treatment by providers to empowering each of us to create our own solutions.

One other bit of late breaking news: Android 5.0 (Lollipop) will enable people to pick up any device and use their applications. This challenges policies that presume that carriers provide devices as a way of delivering and billing for the services. It’s more reason to shift to a model of funding common infrastructure rather than trying to maintain the fiction that we communicate within pipes.

Protocols for Connected Things

A new generation of protocols can be built using the existing Internet just as today’s Internet repurposed our telecom infrastructure.

Self-Chosen Identifiers: Use identifiers chosen by the devices themselves without any central function. We can use methods such as GUIDs (Globally Unique Identifiers—random numbers) as one mechanism. We don’t have to depend on having a central provider of identifiers in order to assure uniqueness. But uniqueness is not always necessary. We deal with ambiguity each day as when we are looking for a Starbucks but don’t care which one. Or we may have multiple John Smith’s and we don’t need a third party to tell us which is which.

Place and Final End Points: We would distinguish between places and final end points. Places don’t move much. This means we can have a relative stable and simple routing tables. End points would be responsible for telling their counterparts where they are at a given time just like we tell our friends our current street address.

Economics for Simplicity: Perhaps most importantly, by funding common facilities we greatly simplify today’s routing by avoiding the twisting and winding passages that are more about the business model of telecommunications than about providing connectivity.

Making every wire a profit center means that the carriers have to prevent unbilled bits from passing. This works at cross-purposes with connectivity and is an impedance mismatch for best efforts connectivity in which raw packets have no intrinsic value.

The Business of Things: Very simply billing for packets requires putting a border around the facilities we use to communicate and makes failure the default. If we are to realize the potential for an “Internet of Things” and enable a connected society, we need policies to make successful connectivity the default and not the exception.