20
Server Software
On 5 January 1941, while flying from Blackpool to RAF Kidlington near Oxford, Amy Johnson1 went off course in poor weather and drowned after bailing out into the Thames Estuary. She was run over by the ship that was sent to her rescue.
It is assumed she lost her sense of direction, although an alternative theory is that she was shot down by the RAF after failing to provide correct identification. Glen Miller met a similar end (probably)2 when hit by a jettisoned bomb. Either way it's a telling illustration that it is easy to get lost in a cloud and not a great idea to rely on less than foolproof identification procedures.
January 2010 marked the 25th anniversary of the cellular industry in the UK and I helped to organise a great big party3 to help raise some funds for a new communications gallery at the Science Museum. The thing is that in an age of austerity it is not deemed politically correct to have a party unless you can prove the event was also informationally useful, which it was and to prove it I am going to crossreference some of the presentations from the predinner conference that have direct relevance to the topic of this chapter, server software. Two data points sourced from the Ericsson presentation4 highlighted some of the issues.
Every two years the number of voice and data sessions doubles. In 2009, more than four exabytes (four billion gigabytes) of unique information were created. This information has to be stored somewhere and only has value if it can be accessed efficiently and effectively. It has been suggested that information and the applications that interact with that information are best accessed when needed rather than locally stored. This is commonly referred to as ‘the cloud’. Information and applications and our relationships with other people and other things in the physical world around us will be mediated through what is in effect a virtual network.
At the time of writing there are somewhere between 300 000 and 400 000 applications (Apps) available for the iPhone. In fact, there are so many to choose from doing so many things that there are apps about apps rather like metadata tags that offer to help you choose what apps to download.5
20.1 The Wisdom of the Cloud?
The argument for or against centralised or distributed information is of course not new – the cloud is just a way of describing well-understood mechanisms for sharing and remotely accessing common resources. This means that ‘the cloud’ combines a mix of familiar benefits and risks.
Realisable benefits apart from the assumed cost savings of shared tenancy could theoretically include an improvement in social efficiency, social mobility and social inclusion, a part of the digital inclusion debate, an improvement in economic efficiency and economic equality, an improvement in intellectual efficiency and an improvement in environmental efficiency. The Ericsson presentation pointed out that using a mobile phone for a year has an equivalent CO2 footprint to driving a car for an hour. If we assume that owning a mobile phone helps us to travel less then this should result in a net environmental gain. Also, apparently 17.4% of subscriptions in Sweden are machine-to-machine compared to 2.4% in Europe and 4.4% in the US. Some of these subscriptions will be for energy monitoring and energy control and environmental monitoring and environmental control, suggesting that additional environmental gains are achievable if the Swedish model were to be more widely applied.
Possible risks include compromised identification procedures, a proxy for safety and security and nonaltruistic political interference and control, of which more later. There are also some practical issues. One of the Ericsson predictions was that by 2013, 80% of all users will access the internet using a mobile phone. This is not the same as saying that 80% of all users will access the cloud by mobile phone but does suggest an expectation that wireless access will be relatively dominant.
However, mobile applications remain constrained by battery limitations. At times it can be more power efficient, faster, more convenient and more secure to store information locally rather than remotely.
And it is certainly true to say that at the time of writing there is no implicit incentive for application developers to make applications either power efficient, bandwidth efficient or code efficient.
Additionally, from a network perspective it is plausible to assume that wireline/guided media average data speeds may continue to increase faster than wireless data speeds, partly due to physics and partly due to available power. The only factor that would prevent this happening is a lack of investment in fibre, copper and cable connectivity that in turn would be a function of the returns achievable from the investment.
20.2 A Profitable Cloud?
On this basis, cellular network investment has historically looked attractive – a base station installed at the right place at the right time could pay for itself in a few months.
It could be argued that markets deliberately structured to be overcompetitive combined with spectral auctions manipulated to maximise short-term returns to national treasuries have destroyed this advantage, though this may be about to change.
20.3 A Rural Cloud?
For example, there is some dependency on population density, which in turn determines the application mix. Rural communities in India as an example typically consume content (earlier we mentioned how popular FM receivers were in mobile phones sold in India) whereas urban areas tend to consume gaming applications.6
20.4 A Locally Economically Relevant Cloud?
Self-evidently, the impact of the cloud will be different in different countries. The weather is dramatically different in different places and so are the clouds.
There may also be regulatory inducement to ensure rural areas are covered either by imposing a levy or tax on urban access (as done in India) or through license conditions (Germany in the 800-MHz band, for example).
Poor rural economies, for instance in India, can be transformed by relatively small increases in connectivity, for example the SMS-based transaction applications discussed earlier in the book.
In April 2010 when we originally researched this topic Nokia had recently introduced their C Series phones targeted at emerging markets such as Indonesia. The product offering was coupled with Nokia's OVI store. OVI, Finnish for open door, who says the Finns don't have a sense of humour, was and at the time of writing still is intended to be Nokia's answer to the Apple applications offer that as of summer 2011 developed into the Apple iCloud.7
The OVI-compatible product range includes low-cost phones with quadband GSM, Bluetooth and WiFi connectivity. It is therefore economically relevant to emerging markets. In June 2011 a similar announcement was made that Series 40 products (market entry level) would support OVI. Note that locally relevant also means supporting local dialects, for example at least 26 dialects in India and 23 in Europe. Local economic relevance can also include applications such as Groupon integrated into a location-aware smart-phone application.8
20.5 A Locally Socially Relevant Cloud?
Thus, while the pundits have been generally dismissive of Nokia's applications offer and while there may be a perception of the offer being subscale in the US and some European markets it should also be noted that this may be part of an ongoing strategy that has seen the Ovi store9 pulling ahead of Apple in emerging markets partly as a result of established distribution, partly by having a wide range of low-cost and relatively simple access products and partly by adding applications to the store that are socially relevant to the local market.
This may reflect a growing recognition that the future of our industry is no longer being shaped by European or US consumer needs. The vendors best placed to take advantage of this shift may be most advantaged.
A hint of this can be read into this June 2011 press briefing from Nokia which highlighted the development of apps for their entry level Series 40 phones:
“Consumers are downloading 6 million mobile apps and content each day from the Nokia Ovi Store, which now has a catalogue of more than 48,000 products available. While much of the emphasis has been on smartphone applications, Series 40 devices, which will enable apps for the next billion mobile phone users, have experienced more than 35 percent growth in download volumes in the last two months, making up about a quarter of the total downloads. More than 170 developers have each exceeded 1 million downloads from the Ovi Store.”
Nokia also stated that they had OVI application and content download billing systems deployed and supported in 121 operator networks across 42 countries including Claro in Chile; Vodafone in Portugal; CSL, 3, SmartTone-Vodafone, PCCW and China Mobile in Hong Kong; and Etisalat in the United Arab Emirates and that the OVI store was available in more than 190 countries and 30 languages, with more than 90% of all store customers downloading apps in their own language. Applications made up about 70% of the total download with the rest being content with a general trend towards applications becoming more dominant in this mix. This probably puts them ahead of RIM and Microsoft but behind Google's Android Market and Apple's App store. Nokia's alliance with Microsoft10 announced in 2009 and consolidated in 201111 is presumably a move to change this relative position over time. One developer, a company called Off Screen Technologies, claimed to have fulfilled more than 72 million downloads with 1000 applications being added per week. On this basis prognostications of the OVI door being closed would seem premature. It's more a case of building a new house with new windows and doors.
This application space is also opening up opportunities for specialist application developers, for example integrating trail guides into location mapping software.12
20.6 A Locally Politically Relevant Cloud – The China Cloud?
But life is not always simple. Politicians in developed countries like to talk about net neutrality and the recent experiences of Google in China suggest that political attitudes to a right of unfiltered access can be substantially different in other parts of the world.
China's ambassador to the UK, Madam Fu Ying, interviewed on the BBC (26/1/2/10)13 made the point that the average income in China is equivalent to the average UK income in 1913 and suggested rather persuasively that it is inappropriate and arrogant to automatically assume that Western values and customs can or should be imposed on other cultures that may be socially and economically different.
Pragmatically, this means that compromises that may seem to be politically incorrect from a western perspective may at times be a necessary mechanism for increasing engagement between different cultures. The hope and aspiration has to be that this engagement results in the better parts of each culture being absorbed, shared and adopted over time.
20.7 The Cultural Cloud?
In this context, consider the following statistics from an Ericsson presentation.14 In January 2010 there were 200 million active users on Facebook and 300 million on the Chinese community QC. 20% of all internet users were Chinese. Between the 25 and 31 January 2009, over the Chinese New Year, over 18 billion SMS messages were sent in China.
18 months later (June 2011) active Facebook users had grown to 500 million15 and 21.4% of all internet users were Chinese.16 This might seem like a small increase from 20% but the effect is massive. This means there are 420 million internet users in China, a population penetration of 31.6%, representing a growth of 1766.7% over the prior ten-year period.
The US comes in a distant second with 240 million users, population penetration of 77.3% and a growth of 151% over ten years. The US makes up 12% of the world market. Hardly surprising then that Nokia remain keen on adding application and content value to lower-end handsets.
The mobile phone is one of the world's most transformative devices with a capability to improve cultural understanding between countries traditionally and tragically distant in the past. The mobile phone and the cloud are potential partners in this process. Nokia remains a player with a number of unique market-positioning advantages that investment analysts seem to be presently underestimating.
The cloud is presented as an enabler of transformative change across consumer, business and specialist user ICT markets and Apple are considered to have achieved a first-mover advantage in this space. The cloud may well prove to be transformative but much of the opportunity analysis is presently very US centric. Asian rather than American clouds and rural clouds rather than urban clouds could well be the global economic and socially transformative weather makers over the next few years.
1 http://www.sciencemuseum.org.uk/onlinestuff/stories/amy_johnson.aspx.
2 http://www.bbc.co.uk/dna/h2g2/A2654822.
3 http://www.cambridgewireless.co.uk/cellular25/.
4 http://www.cambridgewireless.co.uk/docs/John%20Cunliffe%20-%20Ericsson%20Ltd%20You%20Tube%20Link.pdf.
5 www.magicsolver.com is one example.
6 R Swaminathan of Reliance Communications presenting at Future of Wireless International Conference in Cambridge, 27 June 2011.
7 http://www.apple.com/icloud/.
9 http://www.ovi.com/services/.
10 http://www.microsoft.com/presspass/press/2009/aug09/08-12pixipr.mspx.
11 http://conversations.nokia.com/2011/02/11/open-letter-from-ceo-stephen-elop-nokia-and-ceo-steve-ballmer-microsoft/.
13 http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/programmes/andrew_marr_show/7970581.stm.
14 http://www.cambridgewireless.co.uk/docs/John%20Cunliffe%20-%20Ericsson%20Ltd%20You%20Tube%20Link.pdf.