“ So how was Latvia?” I asked Erin when she returned from her year abroad.“Estonia,” she replied.
“Right,” I said.“The difference is important,” she
added.Of course, she was right. I admit that I was a little skeptical
when Erin approached me with the idea of spending a year studying technology in the Baltics. I didn’t think of the region as a promising center of innovation. Certainly, I knew that Finland identified itself as a major economic force in the cell phone industry and that Estonia had built a network infrastructure that had been thoroughly overwhelmed by a denial-of-service attack that may or may not have been instigated by its Russian neighbor.
Beyond these two things, I saw little of interest. However, the real issue was not the promise of the region, but the prospects for the individual.
Erin had designed that year to create a space for herself. She was going to spend some time making her first mark upon the field of technology. In many ways, it was the same kind of task her country of study had faced time and again. For most of its existence, Estonia has been a small part of some larger empire. Its name derives from the words for “eastern land,” which was
former Soviet state. Estonians make heavy use of the Web and boast of their e-government services—an online database makes possible everything from e-voting to obtaining e-prescriptions. Estonian friends mocked my American checkbook—none of them had ever seen such a thing. In Estonia, 98 percent of all bank transactions are handled electronically.
Skype is only one option in the competitive telecommunications sector in Estonia. In addition to the Skype-filled computer screens found in most homes and offices, the country ha s four mobi le service providers, with broadband connections in two-thirds of the households, and WiMax or wireless Internet available in most parts of the country.
Estonia’s current president, Toomas Hendrik Ilves, claims that the country’s future “will be advanced best by investments … that reward doing and enterprise, innovation and creativity,”
Born to Estonian parents who fled first the Nazis and then the Soviets, Ilves grew up in the shadow of the telecommunications industry in New Jersey. His nation now has an information and telecommunications industry that is the largest in the Baltics. This industry has deployed a broad range of services that include a resilient voice network and electronic
In the Internet’s artificial geography, an organization is identified by what it can do rather then by where it’s located.
David Alan Grier, George Washington University
Erin Dian Dumbacher, Atlantic Media Company
applied to the region when it was a corner of the Swedish empire.
For almost 200 years, Estonia was part of the Russian empire. In the mid-20th century, it was occupied by Germany and later became the northwestern edge of the Soviet Union. In the past decade, Estonia has been allied with the digital empire that is centered on San Jose. In embracing technology, it has tried to establish a central position in the artificial geography of the Internet, a geography that identifies an organization by what it can do with data rather than where it is located.
A RESPONSE FROM ERINI need to interrupt here. I’m the one
who actually went to Estonia. David tends to remember stories the way he wants to think of them. It’s not that he remembers them incorrectly; he simply puts his own ideas at the center and pushes everything else to the edges.
I didn’t go to Estonia only to study Skype. That would make as much sense as visiting New York City and spending the time walking through the original offices of Bell Laboratories. (I think David did that once to see what the old laboratory structure on West Street would tell him about the researchers. I thought it odd.)
I went to Estonia to see “E-stonia,” the best example of a high-tech economy that has developed in a
old Soviet phone service, which was awful. Not only was the phone system regularly tapped, it had low-quality connections and very few phone sets. An entire apartment block might share a single telephone. Admittedly, while the Soviet phone system was indeed bad, so were the phone systems in many other parts of the world at that time. None of them produced a company that capitalized on VoIP technology.
DAVID REASSERTS CONTROL
Before we go much further, I need to make two comments. First, I don’t disagree with Erin’s claim that I tell stories to make my own points. I simply want people to believe that I do it for good and benign purposes.
Second, I would argue that connecting VoIP to Kazaa and peer-to-peer file sharing misses an important aspect of its development—the step that took it from being an isolated technology to being a service that had to interact with large, powerful institutions. VoIP had its origins in the multimedia community that f lourished in the 1980s. It was originally developed to help support the interactions of individuals working in different locations on a common task. “The primary focus in this stage was on audio and video conferencing over the Internet,” explained one history of the technology.
By the early 1990s, researchers had identified VoIP as a valuable technology in its own right. Several firms developed software products that allowed two individuals to hold conversations using their PCs and
9APRIL 2011
the Internet. However, all of these systems worked in isolation. “Each product relied on a proprietary signaling protocol for call set up and tear down,” continued the technological history, “which made it virtually impossible for two vendors’ products to interoperate.”
In 1995, the International Tele-communication Union began to develop a standard for a common set of protocols for VoIP that would a llow the various commercia l systems to communicate with one another. As this standard developed, the considerations included not only the problem of connecting two VoIP systems from different vendors but also the issue of connecting VoIP to the large switched telephone networks.
This standard, which was event-ually identified as H.323, proved to be a significant milestone in the development of VoIP, as it allowed the newer, smaller technology to interact with some of the largest technical institutions around the world. In most countries, the telephone company was a government entity, a highly regulated monopoly, or at the least a very large sector of the local economy. By providing the means of connecting VoIP service to the local telephone grid, the standard might have solved a technical issue, but it also posed a substantial economic problem: the financing of local telephone grids.
Traditionally, phone companies used revenue from long-distance calls to subsidize the construction and operation of local nets. Local “facilities were used at both ends of every long-distance call,” explained an analysis of telephone policy. “And the greatest part of the cost of the local network was fixed, not sensitive to the level of its traffic.”
When the US divided the telephone monopoly into smaller units, regulators devised a regulatory and payment structure to support local networks. That plan unleashed a storm of political criticism. “After five years of nurturing the plan,”
voting technology that seems to be secure and popular.
Of course, this growing cyber- infrastructure has made Estonia particularly vulnerable to cyber-attacks. Denial-of-service attacks in April and May 2007 overwhelmed government, media, and financial sites. These incidents demonstrated that no country is isolated in this age.
After first attempting to close the borders to halt traffic into the country, Estonian telecom managers discovered that they had no choice but to terminate all services for visitors and clients. They succeeded in reestablishing services only with the assistance of regional and international friends. Sweden supplied critical infrastructure experts. A firm in California offered platform services. Servers in Europe and the Mideast provided a coordinated response to the attacking bots.
In my ef for t to understand the Estonian IT landscape, I did visit the Skype offices. However, I have to remind David that the company’s official headquarters are in Luxembourg, which is more or less the Delaware of the European Union. “Skype’s leadership flies from Luxembourg to London to the Valley; their headquarters are everywhere, really,” a Skype staffer told me.
Skype was founded in 2003 by five developers: three Estonians, a Swede, and a Dane. The team was first involved in taking Kazaa to market, which tried to exploit the Internet through peer-to-peer (P2P) file sharing. The team left that business when the recording industry successfully argued that the service undermined copyright law, and brought their experience to Skype to make it a rare success in the era following the dot-com bust.
When we talked about writing an article related to my experiences in Estonia, David speculated that E s tonia n developers beca me interested in Voice over IP (VoIP) because they had lived with the
VoIP was originally developed to help support the interactions of individuals working in different locations on a common task.
THE KNOWN WORLD
COMPUTER 10
reported a pair of researchers, “the government lost control of the public process altogether.”
In the late 1990s, many of those working with VoIP acknowledged that bypassing “standard telephone charges was then regarded as one of the main economic drivers for VoIP.” However, rather than immediately shifting large amounts of voice traffic to the Internet, voice quickly generated new traffic that the traditional phone network couldn’t have easily accommodated—the traffic that supported business process outsourcing.
Just as firms began to implement the H.323 standard, they began to see that business process out-sourcing could be a large industry that required massive amounts of telecommunications services. In just a few years, it had grown to become a $100 million dollar business. Future growth depended upon the availability of inexpensive voice and data services. “Infrastructural facilities or lack of these have often been underlined as the most crucial in terms of work and the economy itself,” explained a policy analyst from India. “This is all the more relevant for industries that depend fundamentally upon telecommunications generally and upon the telecommunications industry more specifically.”
A PROTEST FOR NEW TECHNOLOGY
Did you see that? David was able to turn a discussion of technology innovations in Estonia into one of business processes and outsourcing to emerging markets. Let’s get back to the main point. Although Estonia is a small country with a population of only 1.3 million, it has become a leader in e-government services as well as an active participant in the global information and communications technology business.
With its aspirations to be a leader in IT and telecommunications, Estonia somehow encourages
turning inst inct ively to these technologies in times of crisis, great or small.
Last winter, I found myself grasping for my mobile phone when I spotted a pack of wolves grazing barely 50 meters from where I was standing. Until the moment I spied the wolves, I had been enjoying, or trying to enjoy, the process of learning how to cross-country ski on a cold, gray winter day in southern Estonia. My hosts were somewhere ahead, and my only companion was a six-year-old child who would only have been an appetizer for the wolves, should they decide to attack. Quietly and with courage, I held up my phone. “Not to worry,” I mimed to the child, “I have my mobile phone in hand.”
Had the wolves turned on us, I suppose I could’ve made an emergency call to explain the situation to friends in Tallinn, family in America, or even a friend in Cameroon. “Wolves are attacking,” I would have said. “I’ll text you a photo; please send help.” Somehow this was reassuring. We could have contacted someone. Perhaps that possibility is the most important thing in such a circumstance.
WHO WILL TAKE YOUR CALL?
As Erin’s experience indicates, the emergency call—the call that asks for help from someone who knows the region, has the skill to act, and is blessed by appropriate authority—is one example of the limitations of modern technology. In our current telephone systems, such calls are regularly sent around the world to be processed by someone located in a faraway place. For example, after the Haitian earthquake in 2010, when the country’s infrastructure was barely operating, some emergency requests were processed by a company in California. Yet, the response to an emergency call usually needs to come from a source close to the caller’s location.
The VoIP protocols can’t always identify a caller’s location, especially if the caller is tapping into the network over a wireless connection. Hence, Skype and several other services don’t support emergency calls and can’t guarantee a connection that can help you in case of a wolf attack. Unless you get local help through other means, you’ve opted for a connection to the broader world in lieu of communal support.
W hen Erin was applying for a scholarship to conduct research in Estonia, she
wrote an essay that began, “I’m one of those people with a complicated answer to the supposedly simple question, ‘Where are you from?’”
Traditionally, we took our identity from the place where we were born and where our parents lived. For those of us who have become increasingly mobile, answering the question of where we’re from has become more difficult as well. Now, where you’re from might be the place you attended school. Or it might be the place where you bought your first cell phone and acquired an area code that would mark you for the rest of your days.
In spite of such mobility, many people have no choice when they answer that question. They live in a specific corner of an empire and are grateful that technology brings work and meaning to them. Their neighbors are those who will offer help when asked. That trouble can be hackers from Russia, invading Swedes, or a family of wolves looking for a snack.
David Alan Grier is an associate pro-fessor of International Science and Technology Policy at George Washing-ton University. Contact him at [email protected].
Erin Dian Dumbacher, a 2009-2010 Fulbright Fellow in Estonia, works for Atlantic Media Company. Contact her at [email protected].
