Wednesday 28 May 2014

Do we need the Delphic Oracle to make sensible telecoms investments?

The Delphic Oracle was the leading seer of ancient Greece. This was reliably established by King Croesus (as in 'rich as'), who had his messengers ask a sample of seers at a pre-agreed time what he was doing at that very moment. The Delphic Oracle correctly said he was making lamb and tortoise stew.

However, the Oracle's statements were rarely this unambiguous -  they tended to be a bit more, well, Delphic. For instance, asked about a prospective military expedition, she replied: "You will go you will return never in war will you perish" - place punctuation at your own risk.

It is sometimes argued that, absent reliable seers, we have to invest in superfast broadband because of the unknown unknowns - the applications that are surely coming, but which we just lack the foresight to predict today.

There are many problems with this argument, but one of them is that its proponents tend to underestimate our foresight. Here for instance the view of my old friends the FTTH Council on how little we knew in 2000 about the drivers of demand for today's broadband:


Just how accurate is it that these things were unforeseen in 2000?

Videoconferencing with Skype
Skype wasn't founded until 2003, but video calls over the internet have been long discussed - at least since 1995, when Stewart Loken of the Berkeley Lab said "internet videoconferencing is about to become commonplace". Obviously to know what bandwidth you might need, you don't need to know the name of the company that's going to be most successful, you just need to know what the application is, so the fact that Skype didn't exist in 2000 is neither here nor there.

HD-TVs with 42" and more in 3D
The first formal HDTV research programme began in 1970. Consumer sets went on sale in the US in 1998, and some of them had 55" displays. 3D TV was trialled as early as 1994.

Facebook
We certainly didn't know about Facebook in 2000, it wasn't founded until 2004. (Though you can discuss with the Winklevoss twins exactly when it was conceived). However social media had been around for a long time - GeoCities, an early example, was founded in 1994. And again, we don't need to know the name of the provider to know the necessary bandwidth. Facebook uses text, pictures and a bit of video - all well understood as internet media in 2000.

Online shops
Amazon was founded in 1994. 'nuff said.

Google
By 2000 Google was already available in 10 languages (and had hired its first chef a year prior)

Digital Photography
The first consumer digital cameras were released in 1990 (the same year as Photoshop). Webshots, founded in 1999, was one of the first web-based photo sharing sites, but consumers had been uploading photos to BBSs (not always savoury ones) for some years before that.

iPad and Smartphones
The Palm VII, one of the first PDAs with wireless capability for internet access, shipped in 1999. I'll give the FTTH Council the iPad, which wasn't widely anticipated. Of course, it doesn't need particularly high bandwidth (though it has driven more traffic by extending hours of internet use in the home).


So, of the Council's seven things "we did not know in 2000" it turns out we did know 6½ of them. Their view of our ignorance is a bit ... ignorant.

The vast majority of things we do with the internet today were in fact anticipated in 2000, at least in broad brush strokes. That's why it's particularly problematic for FTTH fans that there are (in their own words) 'no really compelling applications yet' for FTTH. In 2000 we knew (roughly) what we would do with broadband speeds. In 2014 we have no real idea what we might do with superfast.

1 comment:

  1. The fact of the existence of the technologies says nothing about your knowledge of them or the weight you placed on them.

    Bill Gates is famous for predicting that 64MB of memory would be more than enough and that the internet would not amount to anything.

    What are the niche technologies of today that will be the mainstream of tomorrow? This is the question that has to be answered because the network we build today will have to service them.

    The total traffic on the internet for a year, 20 years ago is transmitted every second today.

    Can the network built today expand a millionfold as the network of 20 years ago was forced to do.
    One thing IS certain, without that expansion, none of those 7 applications you mention could have thrived.

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