Martin Geddes www.martingeddes.com mail@martingeddes.com

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.

© 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.

NOW

Past Future

The presentation starts by looking at the past of voice, then the future,

before returning to the present.

Telco

CONFUSION

?

? Web

The present is very confusing, because we are seeing the

collision of two conflicting sets of values and ideas.

I am putting forward a hypothesis as to what

emerges from that confusion.

Convergence Fragmentation

For telcos, there is increasing dissonance between the

values, beliefs and behaviours that made them successful,

and the current reality.

NOW

The emphasis on interoperation, federation,

standards, vertical integration doesn’t fit with the reality of

fragmentation of voice.

POTS PSTN + PLMN +

“Public SIP Interconnect System”

+ Skype + Xbox + …

Just a feature of the Cloud,

Web and Apps

As is readily seen from current

trends.

Three big future changes

1. User experience

2. Business model

3. Network technology

Reconciliation with reality requires three big shifts.

Telco

Let’s start with the trajectory of telcos.

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 shouldn’t! 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! What’s yours?”

Presence

This illusion has a name. It is called ‘cognitive absorption’.

The guy on the left isn’t falling for the trick – he’s just rubbing his ear with a lump of plastic.

We’ve 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.

“Hegemony

of the

caller”

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.

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

$

telephony labor

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

A minute of labor cost less than a minute of

long distance telephony.

Equalized between c.1982-2000

$ $

telephony labor In c. 1982 you could

hire a college graduate at parity per minute with fixed-line long

distance calls.

By 2000, even a mobile minute was cheaper

than hiring a high school graduate for 60

seconds.

Today

telephony labor

$ Today, labor far exceeds the cost of telephony. It

is our time that is scarce, not our

machinery of talk.

Universal service

Emergency lifeline

Legal intercept

Telco social contract

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

Telco device Telco access Telco service

Network roaming

Plus an extraordinarily successful system that has served to connect

billions of people around the world. Hurrah for telcos!

PRESENT So let’s roll forward to

the present.

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

Telcos exist in co-opetition with ‘over the top’ (OTT)

players for services revenue.

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’

CLOUD

ACCESS

COVERAGE

CLOUD

SERVICE

COVERAGE

So if you can’t beat them, join them.

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

Telco-OTT World

Product-centric

Mixture of telco and

3rd party devices,

access and services

? Which is giving rise to

a hybrid model of service delivery.

However, the Internet cannot and never will carry society’s real-time communications needs. It is

fundamentally unsuited to the job.

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.

Web

Let’s go look at the parallel evolution of the web and

hypermedia.

PAST

Again, we’ll go right back to the beginning.

“What a computer is to me is it’s the most remarkable tool that

we’ve ever come up with, and it’s the equivalent of a

bicycle for our minds.” – Steve Jobs

Computer folk start with a different mind-set. Networks aren’t about

telephones and telegraphs, but about connecting computers.

Ideas

And specifically, they see computers as effort amplifiers

for spreading ideas.

doc → doc

HYPERLINK 1.0

…A ‘PLACE’ METAPHOR And as ideas naturally are

expressed via documents, these are amplified via hyperlinks.

Documents get URLs

Documents Homepages Blogs Which gave rise to this world. (With blogs being a stepping

stone to the next phase of the Web’s evolution.)

Hypertext

WEB 1.0

…MINIMAL IMPACT ON VOICE …SOME IMPACT ON FAX

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.

doc → event

HYPERLINK 2.0

…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.

Events get URLs

Images Status updates

@pointers #tags

Tags

There was an explosion of use and innovation based on this

new stream metaphor.

“Social web”

WEB 2.0

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

Hypermessaging

WEB 2.0

…SIGNIFICANT IMPACT ON SMS

Because in retrospect we had invented a new hypermedium.

Thoughts

Which amplified individual thoughts.

PRESENT

So let’s 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

Web

CONFUSION

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

FUTURE

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

“Cloud text”?

Hypertext A simple observation points the way.

Whilst we talk of ‘cloud voice’, we don’t talk of ‘cloud text’.

It’s ‘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.

Links what we say to what we do

HYPERVOICE

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

Hypervoice

WEB 3.0

…TRANSCENDS TELEPHONY

event → event

HYPERLINK 3.0

…A ‘TEMPORAL’ METAPHOR

Voice gestures get URLs

The web gets a new linking structure, one based on

time. Humans aren’t nearly as intuitive at managing

temporal metaphors as they are at spatial ones.

Magician! So hypervoice upgrades us

from illusionists to magicians.

“Daddy – you’re 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

1. User experience

2. Business model

3. Network technology

“Hegemony

of the

caller”

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

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

1. User experience

2. Business model

3. Network technology

PUBLIC ENTERPRISES

Co

nve

rsatio

n G

ap

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.

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

1. User experience

2. Business model

3. Network technology 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

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

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

Internet Protocol

Monoservice overlays

We do this via isolating flows using overlays.

So we’ve now got multiple shades of sepia.

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.

CLOSING THOUGHTS WE’RE NEARLY DONE

Technological Revolutions &

Financial Capital

Carlota Perez

Steam, Coal, Iron, Railways

Electricity, Steel & Heavy

Engineering

Oil, Petrochemicals & Automobiles

IT & Telecoms ? Biotech, Nanotech

1770 2012

The Turning Point

Purpose-for-fitness Fitness-for-purpose

Each revolution has a period of around 70

years where we work out how stuff works.

Finally there is a golden age, as society re-organises

around the technology and reaps the benefits.

Then a bubble and financial collapse,

social disorder.

Technology becomes modular, reliable and

invisible.

Example: farms bought one motor, and lots of

adapters.

Example: your toothbrush has a

micro-motor.

Transistor in 1940s.

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

Web

CONFUSION

Packaged Cloud

Services

“Libreville”

Focuses on containing failure modes of

applications. What telcos have always

done.

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

today.

NOW

Past Future

Back to the present…

Railroads vs roads

USF, ICC, PSTN transition…?

The railroad regulator is out of business, the

railroads are not.

Same issues in 19th century.

Roads changed the model, obsoleted these issues. Our roads are internet, cloud, cognitive

radios, community networks.

The telecoms regulator largely exists to perpetuate problems it was

invented to resolve a century ago.

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

Focus on the

customer not the regulator

Else you’ll go down together.

What do you need to do?

1. Understand hypervoice future.

2. Get cloudy for service delivery.

3. Buy network flexibility.

4. Import inventive services.

5. Export successful services.

www.martingeddes.com

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