smarting the dumb pipes
DESCRIPTION
Ross Turk gave this keynote talk at Gluecon 2010 in Denver, Colorado.TRANSCRIPT
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les seauxstupidepoignées de porte de réseau pour une dactylo sueur
Oh, sorry, I work for a french company now. We are required to prepare our presentations in english and french...it’s kind of a new experience for me - like being in Canada!
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smarting the dumb pipesnetwork servicesfor developers This is the story of how
we’re applying the lessons of an open ecosystem to a closed one.
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main() { puts “hello, world!”;}
main() {for(;;) { puts “hello, world!”;}
}
#include <stdio.h>
main() { for(;;) {
printf ("hello, world!\n"); }}
#include <stdio.h>
main() { for(;;) {
printf ("hello, world!\n"); printf ("I like you.\n"); }} I worked at SourceForge
for all of the last decade, where my job was to make sure people could share technology and make it better. Now I work in telecommunications.
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I’ve gone from working in the most open ecosystem in the world to one of the most tightly controlled.
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the network
You may wonder what we’re doing here.
We haven’t exactly done a good job so far of “working” with modern developers.
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This is Alcatel-Lucent’s US headquarters. Raise your hand if you know what we do.
Nobody? Really? Oh, well let me tell you.
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Active WDM
Central Offices
Serving Office
Regional Transport
1692 OPS
1692 MSE
1692 MSE
1692 OPS
GX 550 Multiservices
Switch
1696 MS
7342 OLT
7330 FTTN
Active DWDM
GR303 TR008 V5.2
7342 ONT Distribution
Cabinet
Splitters Up to 64
GPON ONTs per PON Line
GPON
Indoor Residential Gateway
VoIP Soft Phone
DHCP
Analog Phone
IPTV Set Top Box
Ethernet, HomePNA or MoCA
POTS
Access Point IP Services Router
Gateway TDM Switch
Sealed Expansion Module
MDU Remote Expansion
Module
DHCP
7342 ONT
Access Point IP Services Router
Metropolis® DMXtend Access Multiplexer
Access Point IP Services Router
Metropolis® DMXtend
Access Multiplexer
Metropolis® DMXpress Access Multiplexer
This is what we do. We sell things that let companies build and run the networks you use every day.
This graph is an example our marketing standards team uses to teach us how to make neat and legible graphs. Everything we do is complex.
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And it has to be complex, because one day it’s going to be bolted into somebody’s rack...
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...or buried underground...
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...or left at the bottom of the sea.
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Most developers (and users) see the network as something they put packets into and receive packets from.
unspeakably huge,
complex,mysterious,
stuffynetwork
thing that nobody
understands
packets
packets
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the “dumb pipe”
That’s where the phrase comes from. Developers just want the network to do one thing: be a reliable pipe to put data through.
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And why not? We all expect things in our everyday life to behave as if they’re simple when they’re anything but.
When I’m at home and I want to discard a liquid of some sort, I pour it in the drain.
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When I want water, I get it from the faucet.
I don’t know where my waste water goes or where my fresh water comes from, I just trust that it will work. The pipes in my house are truly “dumb” to me. Or, maybe, I’m dumb to them.
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This makes the networks feel kind of bad because, well, nobody likes to be taken for granted.
What? You don’t feel sorry for them? Let’s all say “awwww”.
To be fair, the networks have been taking us for granted a little bit too.
There’s another, better, reason why this is a problem.
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(disclaimer: this data is complete bs, i made it up to illustrate the point)
revenue per user network demand industry awesomeness
The bigger problem is that the situation is financially untenable.
Pricing the network as a cheap commodity hasn’t been working very well.
Services have driven way more demand than anybody expected, or have designed the current business model around.
Something new has to be done, or we may see drastic changes to the net as we know it: the end of flat-rate service or more and more dropped calls).
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user context
content
communicationscall control, messaging
preferences, contacts, device, location
storage, distribution, transcoding
accountingpayments, authentication, history
The networks have the potential to be more than just a commodity, though - they can offer a lot of capabilities that developers can’t get anywhere else.
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Active WDM
Central Offices
Serving Office
Regional Transport
1692 OPS
1692 MSE
1692 MSE
1692 OPS
GX 550 Multiservices
Switch
1696 MS
7342 OLT
7330 FTTN
Active DWDM
GR303 TR008 V5.2
7342 ONT Distribution
Cabinet
Splitters Up to 64
GPON ONTs per PON Line
GPON
Indoor Residential Gateway
VoIP Soft Phone
DHCP
Analog Phone
IPTV Set Top Box
Ethernet, HomePNA or MoCA
POTS
Access Point IP Services Router
Gateway TDM Switch
Sealed Expansion Module
MDU Remote Expansion
Module
DHCP
7342 ONT
Access Point IP Services Router
Metropolis® DMXtend Access Multiplexer
Access Point IP Services Router
Metropolis® DMXtend
Access Multiplexer
Metropolis® DMXpress Access Multiplexer
...?Raise your hand if you’ve had a good experience partnering with a carrier and developing against these services.
Nobody? Really? Wow!
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Here’s what’s happened instead: people have found a way around.
Developers figured out how to do a lot of this stuff, while only relying on the network to send and receive packets.
This has generally been very successful, but I think that the network can play a much larger part than that.
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network enablers
Active WDM
Central Offices
Serving Office
Regional Transport
1692 OPS
1692 MSE
1692 MSE
1692 OPS
GX 550 Multiservices
Switch
1696 MS
7342 OLT
7330 FTTN
Active DWDM
GR303 TR008 V5.2
7342 ONT Distribution
Cabinet
Splitters Up to 64
GPON ONTs per PON Line
GPON
Indoor Residential Gateway
VoIP Soft Phone
DHCP
Analog Phone
IPTV Set Top Box
Ethernet, HomePNA or MoCA
POTS
Access Point IP Services Router
Gateway TDM Switch
Sealed Expansion Module
MDU Remote Expansion
Module
DHCP
7342 ONT
Access Point IP Services Router
Metropolis® DMXtend Access Multiplexer
Access Point IP Services Router
Metropolis® DMXtend
Access Multiplexer
Metropolis® DMXpress Access Multiplexer
rest
ims
parlay
sandwich
esperanto
In order for a developer to access these capabilities without needing a partnership with a carrier and a full understanding of network internals, they need to be exposed using web services.
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A large benefit of exposing these capabilities through web services is that they aren’t just available to the cable router, set-top box, or mobile device that connects you to the network...they’re available to applications that run anywhere.
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enablers
network provider
provider 2 provider 3
... ?The problem with network providers opening up APIs to developers is that there are so many of them. Over 700.
Partnering with a single carrier is hard, who wants to partner with 700?
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enablers enablers enablers
unified network API
provider 1 provider 2 provider 3
What the industry needs is a centralized place for developers to code against that knows which network to pass the request along to.
We’re in a good position to do this because we’re close to the networks without actually being one of them.
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But wait - we were talking about money. How does any of this fix the carrier business model?
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location: $0.045/call sms: $0.035/call
Some networks charge developers per-call for access to their services, costing as much as five cents/call for the most expensive ones.
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300,000/daysms
advertising
Let’s say, for example, you built an application using SMS and advertising, and you were able to get enough users to send 300k SMSs every day and show 500k ad impressions.
500,000/day(eCPM of $2)
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revenue: $1,000/daysms cost: ($10,500)/day
net: ($9,500)/day
sms + advertising
By paying for SMS messages on a per-call basis, you could possibly lose a substantial amount of money...and, worse, it doesn’t scale.
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API pricing models that charge up-front fees for developers can make it really hard to get your business off the ground.
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This may be a bit of a departure, but I will come back around: Some things go really well together, like chocolate and peanut butter, strawberries and cream, mayonnaise and french fries, cocaine and baking soda.
I think the same thing holds true for network capabilities and other technology.
++
+
location +
sms + advertising
billing
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$30$70
$75
$125
$700
developerad providersms providernetwork provideroverhead
Instead of charging per call, developers can use bundled APIs to share their revenues with API and network providers.
If these providers give you something of value, and you’re successful enough to make money, they get paid.
That’s what we’re working on.
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revenue: $1,000/day to providers: ($300)/day
net: $700/day
sms + advertising
Using a bundled API, our example app begins to generate revenue.
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This is hard. Really hard.
Not only do we need to prove that the business model works, but we need to build the APIs and convince the carriers to turn them on.
This might take a while, even though we’re being super aggressive.
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If you have an API that you think might pair up with a capability from the network to make something interesting, email this guy. He’s sitting right over there.
redg wantsyour api
really bad
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http://openapiservice.com
We have APIs in our lab that you can play around with. Although only one carrier is on-board now, we’re in talks with lots of carriers to expand the program.
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What network API would you use in your app if we were to launch it tomorrow?
What capabilities have we not thought of?
what APIs should the network expose?
Wednesday, May 26, 2010