Posts Tagged ‘RCS’

Back to the Future Station

Saturday, July 31st, 2010
Back to the Future Station

L - R: Carter, Neumann, Kii, Sato

On my recent business trip to Tokyo, I had the opportunity to have lunch with my good friend Hajime Kii and his family.  I know Kii-san from when he was a senior executive at NTT America and I was working at CITI at Columbia University.  Kii-san was kind enough to arrange a visit to NTT DOCOMO’s Future Station for me and WIK’s CEO Karl-Heinz Neumann while we were in town.  At its Future Station, DOCOMO presents a short film showcasing its high-concept vision of its product and service offerings for the near-term future.

I had mentioned to Kii-san that I had seen it in 2001 as part of a delegation from Columbia University including Eli Noam and Robert Pepper (now at Cisco Systems).  The 2001 version included a short film showed DOCOMO’s vision for wireless communications in the year 2010.  Eli and Pepper kept giggling and looking at me because the kid in the 2001 film was named “Ken”.  Now that it is 2010, I was clearly interested to compare the 2001 film to the 2010 version and to the products currently offered.

Well, aside from the fact that the kid in the film is now called Hiro, many of the ideas in the 2001 film have made their way into current products and prototypes.  After the film we got to tour their showroom.  Granted, the floating touch screens are still science fiction; however, products like ITS (Intelligent Transportation Systems), augmented reality, multimedia handsets, mobile commerce, and location-aware services have made it into their cool new handsets.  My favorite handset comes with a detachable QWERTY keyboard and a projection monitor.  One can use any Bluetooth keyboard (unlike my complaint with the iPhone) and can use the detachable projector to make presentations (movie screen not included).  We also were able to play with a protype handset which does augmented reality, allowing you to see what it would be like to have a new car (you can change the style, color, etc.) in your driveway.  Dr. Neumann was able to use one of display handsets to buy a drink from a vending machine and buy a Big Mac from a McDonald’s mock-up.  Using your cell phone to pay for anything from train tickets to lunch to groceries is completely old hat in Japan.  DOCOMO also showed us two new handsets which have natural wood exteriors.

Hokusai's Great Wave off Kanagawa

Hokusai's Great Wave off Kanagawa

The other cool fact I learned from the 2010 film is that the yukio-e woodblock prints of the master Hokusai Katsushika captured the movement of water at 1/5000 of a second.  (By comparison, most digital SLR cameras are not faster than 1/1000 of a second.)

Insight: DOCOMO’s Future Station is very cool.  While visiting the Future Station, I was like a kid in a candy shop on Christmas morning.  Being there reminded me why I got into telecommunications in the first place – because tomorrow will always a brighter day with bigger (smaller), better, faster and Cooler Stuff.  I will have to go back in 2020.  I will give you an update then.

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Report from ITS

Friday, July 9th, 2010

ITSEvery once in a while, one comes across something so trivial yet so flattering.  I was fortunate enough to attend the International Telecommunications Society 18th Biennial Conference in Tokyo last week.  I attended the panel on radio spectrum on the last day of the conference.  Two of the four papers presented on the spectrum panel were derived in some way from research I published in 2009.

The first paper was the History and Conceptual Development of Spectrum Commons in the USA by Nattawut Ard-Paru of the Chalmers University of Technology.  The historical treatment of her paper was taken from taken from Coase (1959), Hazlett (1998) and my Unlicensed to Kill: A brief history of the FCC’s Part 15 Rules.  Npot bad company to be in!

The fourth paper on the panel was Exclusive Spectrum Rights vs. Spectrum Commons by Dr. Kiyotaka Yuguchi of Sagami Women’s University.  Dr. Yuguchi reviews some of the recent literature in an attempt to synthesize commons and exclusive rights approaches.  He then develops certain extensions to my 2009 spectrum pricing model in my paper Next Generation Spectrum Regulation for Europe: Price-Guided Radio Policy.  Dr. Yuguchi looks at the marginal rate of substitution for technology for spectrum.  This is admittedly only implicit in my interference function.  He makes it explicit. However, this is what I had hoped people would do with the basic model – add complications and refinements which I did not have the resources to do in the original paper.

Insight:  I have been working in radio communications for nearly a decade.  It was so encouraging for me to see that my recent work is having such an important impact on the direction of current research.  If you work hard enough and long enough, you every once in a while you earn bragging rights.

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Japan Communications’ New Business Model

Wednesday, October 28th, 2009

On my October business trip to Tokyo, I took time to meet with Japan Communications‘ CEO Frank Sanda.  I know Frank from my work on the Eamon Ryan’s Advisory Forum on Broadband.  I wanted to see Frank and his team because they just launched a new product for Hewlett-Packard.  HP will now sell netbooks in Japan which come with 100 minutes of mobile wireless connectivity. Consumers can buy connectivity on a pay-as-you-go basis from Japan Communications, but branded as an HP service.

Japan Communications built a really cool billing system to handle payment and authentication.  But, Japan Communications does not have a wireless network.  That it gets from the leading carrier NTT DoCoMo. Japan Communications leases capacity on DoCoMo’s network nationwide, and has the ability to purchase more capacity as this business grows. HP gets to determine which devices are sold and can sell the connectivity as its own.  Furthermore, Japan Communications could set up such a system to sell anyone else’s networked devices.  Say, how about a Carterfone?

While Japan Communications negotiated with DoCoMo to get on its network, it was able to do so because the Japanese Ministry for Communications and Information created which rules opened the networks of three largest wireless operators DoCoMo, KDDI, and SoftBank to wholesale. There was apparently a three-year battle at the Ministry in which Japan Communications was at the center. Japan’s policy to require wholesale access to wireless networks goes further than the US FCC’s rules for its 700 MHz auction which mandated these open these networks to foreign devices and handsets.

Insight: This seems like a really cool business model with implications for carriers, devices manufacturers, and application service providers around the world. I have said in a previous Cool Stuff, it is not a question of whether wireless networks should be open or closed. Rather, there is some optimal level of openness which will maximize the carrier’s return.  A privately determined level of openness will no doubt diverge from a level of openness which represents a public optimal. However, this begs the question whether opening networks to wholesale in this way is good policy and whether the Europe and the US should follow suit.  The answer is far more complex than can be addressed in a humble blog entry.  Nonetheless, I am curious see how this market will develop.

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Cool Cube

Saturday, October 24th, 2009
C is for CUBE

C is for CUBE. The School has its own hand sign.

On my trip to Japan earlier this month, I was invited by my good friend Prof. Harumasa Sato to speak to his undergraduate students at the Konan University in Kobe.  Prof. Sato did not ask me to talk about spectrum, Net Neutrality, interconnection, or some other issue in communications.  Rather, he asked me to speak to his students about my life and international career experience.  Since this is the inaugural year for the school, so I was delighted to address the students.

Prof. Sato is the Dean of the new business school and spent the past three years setting it up. And, what can I say for his efforts?  It’s totally fucking cool.  The school is referred to as “CUBE”, aptly named for the building cube-like shape.  Prof. Sato roams the halls speaking to his students. (When I was in business school, and the students saw the Dean coming, they went the other way).  Inside, the building is a fantastic mix of high-tech classrooms, work spaces, meeting spaces, and offices. The main lounge is an English-only “O-Zone” so that the students can practice their business English.  The TV in the lounge is not a TV, it’s a Mac streaming YouTube.  Everything is wireless, including room lighting controls, projection monitors, and the contactless RFID security passes, which are in cell phones. Students use their cell phones not only as security cards to gain entrance to certain areas of the building, but to buy drinks from the vending machines.

Insight:  Kids today, I tell you.  They don’t know how cool they’ve got it.  My time at CUBE got me thinking about my own undergraduate experience.  As a college student, I spent Spring and Summer semesters junior year studying in Japan.  I cannot imagine how different my education would have been had we had these technologies and the wide-spread adoption of the Internet.

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No, Mr. Bond, I expect you to dive!

Wednesday, March 5th, 2008

squba_a1_250.jpgThe other day while I was waiting for a haircut, I picked up a German auto magazine. Since I cannot read German, I figured I would get more out of it than any other magazine. At the very least I could make some sense of the classifieds. Well, I found this, the sQuba. It is a concept car from a Swiss company called Rinspeed. The car is a Lotus Elan converted with an electric motor and all the necessary gear to make it a submersible, à la James Bond in The Spy Who Loved Me.

Insight: Alright, this has nothing to do with communications; however, since I was in the third grade I always assumed that I would build one of these in my garage. This is possibly the coolest thing ever. I simply must have one.

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