Paul Tingey

From W3 to the World Wide Web

Fifteen years ago this week, on the 30th of April 1993, two directors from the CERN Particle Physics Laboratory signed and published a document which relinquished "all intellectual property rights to" and permitted "anyone to use, duplicate, modify and redistribute" a technology they referred to as W3.

Today W3 is better know as the World Wide Web, but the concept is the same; a scalable, platform independent information medium where documents are connected through hypertext links. This ground breaking idea was the brainchild of Sir Tim Berners-Lee, now the Director of the World Wide Web Consortium and a respected technology visionary.

It would be easy to say that, fifteen years ago, no-one could possibly have anticipated how the release of W3 into the public domain would change the way that information is created, recorded, transfered, used and (unfortunately) abused. However, it is clear that Berners-Lee and CERN developed W3 with a specific set of activities and applications in mind and, broadly speaking, those same applications still drive how the World Wide Web is used today.

In one paragraph of CERN's original two page press release the organisation outlines the application areas for which W3 was well suited. The list includes :

• technical design notes
• documentation
• news
• discussion
• educational material
• personal notes
• publicity
• bulletin boards
• live status information
• numerical data

Other than some obvious scientific and research overtones, these key application areas still hold true today although the terminology has evolved. So, for example, discussion now takes place in forums, publicity is sought through corporate websites and personal notes appear in blogs and on the pages of social networking sites.

In fact only in the last couple of years have we really begun to see the web grow out of it's infancy and push CERN's original vision further than may have been anticipated at it's birth. YouTube, deviantART and Google Maps don't easily fit into any of CERN's original application types and, as such, mark the beginning of what may be the second age of the web. Some refer to this adolescent web as Web 2.0 but personally I'm not keen on that label since it hints towards a step change in the infrastructure whereas in reality todays web is more about evolved applications than a revolution in the underlying technology. The term Web 2.0 only really exists because we don't have a snappier way to describe the trend towards web applications based on collaboration, software services and multimedia data that we are now witnessing.

And where does the evolution of the World Wide Web take us next ?  Well, those eager to get some pointers may be interested to read about Semantic Web, an evolution of the World Wide Web proposed by Berners-Lee which provides a data sharing framework and enables a highly integrated "web of data". Lets not give it a version number yet - let's just look forward to the more mature years of a "middle aged" future web.

Mobile Broadband dongles find success in UK

There seems to have many news stories about the imminent rise of 3G technology in the UK over the last few years. Looking back these stories would seem to have heralded repeated false dawns with 3G being relegated to little more than another mobile voice calling technology. However we now seem to have positive proof that 3G based mobile broadband is becoming a viable alternative to (or addition to) more traditional broadband technologies for UK users.

In a blog entry titled Mobile net takes off, Rory Cellan-Jones of the BBC includes what he describes as "an extraordinary graph" showing how the amount of data crossing the 3 mobile operator's 3G network has increased 14 fold in just six months.

According to 3 this massive increase in the amount of data throughput on their 3G network is due to what they refer to as dongles - plug-and-play USB modems that use High-Speed Downlink Packet Access or HSDPA technology (sometimes referred to as 3.5G) to enable laptops to use mobile broadband. 3 launched their dongles last October and immediately saw a huge increase in the traffic crossing it's network.

The dongles are being offered with a fixed price plan (for example 3GB of data for £15 a month) which has triggered a price war in the UK market with other operators such as T-Mobile and Vodafone competing with similarly aggressive deals.

The responses to Rory's post are generally positive about 3's mobile broadband service and it seems clear that possibly as many as half a million new users have signed up to 3's dongle and now use mobile broadband on their laptop (or desktop) machines.

Of course many of these users are likely to have made a choice between competing technologies which means that mobile broadband dongles may now be taking market share from, for example :

• traditional wireless LAN technology which, whilst fairly commonly found, is less pervasive and less mobile than 3G and is rarely provided as a free service in the UK
• fixed broadband services which often incur significant installation fees for new users and often require users to pay an additional monthly fee for a fixed phone service (a service which is itself under threat from low cost mobile payment plans)
• WiMax (or 802.16e) which may not have a significant market share currently but it's interesting to consider how the success of 3.5G/HSDPA based services may impact it's roll-out over the next few years

How this tangled marketplace of competing technologies evolves will become apparent over the next months and years but one thing seems clear - after several years of promise, 3G technology seems to have gained a significant foothold in the UK market.

The MVA - a consortium of consortia !

There is no doubt that open or industry standards now cover a large proportion of the technology components used in telecoms infrastructure equipment (as well as other markets). They have been so widely accepted that hardware, software and silicon manufacturers have organized themselves into consortia to coordinate their effects and create widely accepted standards within their technology fields.

In fact, the drive towards standardized components has become so widespread that these consortia have now created an industry movement of their own which requires coordination and marketing effort. So whose job is that?

Is answer is The Mountain View Alliance, a consortium of consortia (an organizational concept for which no noun yet exists !) created with the aim of "enabling the COTS ecosystem through coordinated open specifications".

The Mountain View Alliance (MVA), whose members include all the significant standardization consortia, operates as an umbrella consortium which coordinates marketing around activities such as shows, seminars and meetings. Whilst each of its member consortia develop and promote standards within their own particular field, the MVA itself promotes the adoption of all standardized components and platforms and therefore aims to create a thriving "open-standards ecosystem".

As proof of the size of the standardization movement, the MVA announced earlier this month that it will sponsor the first ever Communications Ecosystem Conference in San Diego next February. They hope to bring together representatives from each of the 500+ organizations which fall under it's somewhat large collective umbrella.

The Mountain View Alliance currently has seven member consortia:

• The SCOPE Alliance
• Communications Platforms Trade Association (CP-TA)
• Service Availability Forum (SA-Forum or SAF)
• RapidIO Trade Association
• Optical Internetworking Forum (OIF)
• PCI Industrial Computer Manufacturer Group (PICMG)
• Open Communications Architecture Forum (OCAF)

Standards-based Communication Technologies: A brief history

Most of the customers I speak to regularly are best described as being in the "telecoms infrastructure equipment" industry and I can honestly say that, without exception, they have all seen significant changes happening in the way they operate over the last few years.

These changes were, and continue to be, driven by a demand for feature-rich applications and increased network bandwidth. The evolution of new technologies such as DSL, 3G and WiFi quickly followed by VoIP, WiMax and IMS has been the catalyst for an increasing demand for new communication "experiences". Users are now looking for feature-rich applications and, critically, they want them today.

Service providers quickly realised that it's not how you provide features (i.e. the technology) that is important anymore. What's important today is which services you can provide and when you can provide them.

This dynamic marketplace has emphasised the need for accelerated product development cycles. Network Equipment Providers (NEPs) had to find a way to leave behind the long development cycle times and relative inflexibility of closed, proprietary designs.

Openness became the name of the game. Standardized hardware and software "building blocks" along with standardized development tools meant that NEPs could shorten their development cycles and reduce costs by developing "standards-based telecommunications platforms".

As similar market dynamics were played out in other technology fields, a new methodology, Device Software Optimization (DSO) was born. This emphasised the need for standardization of technologies, a broad partner base and reuse of intellectual property.

Today, for telecoms hardware and software vendors as well as our customers, open-standards are becoming part of the ecosystem through consortia such as the SCOPE Alliance and the CP-TA. These groups have validated and, in essence, breathed live into open-standards in the telecoms infrastructure equipment industry.

I was lucky enough to attend a SCOPE Alliance meeting last week and was fascinated to see how representatives of seven multinational NEPs worked together to discuss their customers requirements for products built on standards based technologies such as Carrier Grade Linux (CGL), AdvancedTCA and the middleware APIs created by the SA-Forum. The output of these discussions is a profile which acts as a feedback loop to organizations who maintain the standards (such as OSDL and PICMG) and to organizations who implement those standards in their products (such as Wind River).

This kind of cooperation would not have happened just a few years ago but, in todays rapidly evolving marketplace, feedback is critical to ensure that open-standards develop in such a way that they enable NEPs, and therefore Service Providers, to provide the services that end users really want.

And ultimately that's what it all about; end-users like you and I who drive the industry to supply us with ultra-cool communication gadgets and to do it right now.