News Corp has finally launched it’s iPad-paper, The Daily, but it’s obviously way too soon to know whether the experiment in a newspaper that’s neither printed nor online, but instead is appliance-targeted, will work. The price is lower than that of print news to be sure, but at $40 a year it’s still more than the largely free online news. Our model says that this might work on a small scale for the iPad market where it could offer a novelty value to a population segment that arguably values novelty more than most, but that it’s not going to work as a broader model.
The notion of online-targeted content seems likely to be a hostage to the battle over neutrality and over usage pricing of bandwidth. Verizon indicated this week that it would start constraining the usage of the top 5% of its mobile customers to insure that customers overall were serviced adequately, and this comes on the heels of Canadian changes to usage caps and a PR campaign by some EU telcos on making OTT video providers pay. How this will all end is hard to say, largely because the topic gets no truly valid coverage. Everything written seems to be a polished advocacy of someone’s commercial perspective, or just a diatribe against paying anything for anything.
Carriers are interested in profits from network-related but not transport/connection-related applications and services, and NSN recently published a commissioned study showing that operators would be natural partners in security and privacy services. That’s true; in fact, operators are natural partners in most applications of technology and facility management and marketing. The challenge for operators is less whether there are markets to be had than whether those markets can be addressed profitably. For decades, perhaps a century or more, they’ve focused on how to create symbiotic infrastructures from diverse equipment types to preserve capital equipment and so to reduce costs and improve profits. Those techniques have not spread to the IT equipment that’s increasingly the key element in new services, and so they’ve been looking for the IT equivalent of the old “Advanced Intelligent Network” architecture of the PSTN. Most now believe that cloud technology, virtualization, and SOA are all integral to that NGN architecture for IT but most also believe that vendors either aren’t presenting a cohesive strategy or aren’t presenting a complete one. For three years, that’s been their complaint, and it’s now possible that they’ll take on the problem themselves by looking at cloud services and extrapolating their own feature infrastructure based on how cloud computing in general and platform-as-a-service in particular solve IT problems for enterprises.
We had our official end of IPv4 this week as well as an IPv6-promoting event, but neither of these facts really changes much. The exhaustion of IPv4 space is hardly a surprise, and the real problem in coping with it has been known for ages—the consumer. There are literally hundreds of millions of devices out there that won’t work with IPv6 addresses, won’t assign them, or both. As long as that base exists, the best you can hope for is dual-stack IPv6, and if you can’t eliminate the use of IPv4 addresses anywhere then you aren’t coping with exhaustion by adding IPv6 to the mix, not to be euphonic. What should have been done is that all wireless hubs and routers and STBs and everything else that either performed NAT or DHCP should have been mandated to support dual-stack long ago. Websites and users could then have gradually migrated from dual-stack to IPv6. Now we have a consumer support issue to deal with at every level.
The telcos have an opportunity here, if you believe in the support-as-a-service concept I just noted. There’s nobody as able to address the migration, there’s no time better than now to take the lead in supporting it. Step up, guys, and you might make a name for yourself, not to mention a profit.