There was once a time in the
not-so-distant past when wireless was going to fulfill the promise of
McLuhan's Global Village in a very tangible, here and now fashion.
The disparate strands of technology and innovation would be tightly
wound in a twine of global unity that would never fray. This vast
super-structure of cooperation and ingenuity would create economies of
scale that would enable all of us - rich and poor, First and Third world
inhabitants alike - to have access to the leading edge at an affordable
cost.
But something funny happened on the way to this one-world
tech utopia: People got greedy. In the wireless landscape, huge telecom
behemoths sprang from whole cloth, each wanting a larger slice of the
pie than the next. These companies fought tooth and nail for market
share, and a handful of them got very fat indeed off of the seemingly
bottomless appetite for wireless communication.
This
dog-eat-dog competition is the very essence of free market enterprise,
and it has netted billions for telecom companies, but according to a
handful of researchers at the University of California at
Berkeley's College of Engineering, who are currently working on
something they call the SAHARA Project, it has also created a bloated,
woefully inefficient telecom
infrastructure.
Service Architecture for
Heterogeneous Access, Resources, and
Applications
Witness the recent financial collapse
of Global Crossing, a company that banked on selling bandwidth for an
abundance of fiber optic capacity, only to discover that its ill-advised
spending glut created a surplus of unused infrastructure. If SAHARA had
had anything to do with it, Global Crossing could have auctioned off
its excess capacity, resulting in a net gain for all involved.
The objective behind SAHARA, or Service Architecture for
Heterogeneous Access, Resources, and Applications, is to understand how
to create efficient, cost-effective telecommunications services when
those services are provisioned from multiple and independent service
providers. The leaders of the SAHARA project - which includes such
engineering luminaries as Randy Katz and Ion Stoica - want no less than
to develop a new architecture for telecom services that supports a
confederation of disparate service providers.
SAHARA is
working towards improved scalability through aggregation, and the use of
hierarchy and cooperation among service providers to make effective
resource allocation decisions. Working with a consortium of investors
that includes Ericsson, Nortel and Sprint, SAHARA wants to help mobile
devices communicate more fluidly across providers. What the SAHARA
researchers envision is an architecture that provides a resource
management system for group policing and watching out for things like
bad cell traffic overflow.
SAHARA co-founder Randy Katz is one
of the world's leading pioneers in database technology and memory
management. In the early 90's, he developed the concept of
Redundant Arrays of Inexpensive Disks (RAID), and led the implementation
of the first large-scale RAID file server for high performance
applications. RAID is now a $12 billion industry, with over 150
companies marketing RAID products. In a recent National Research Council
Report, RAID was cited as one of nine key information technologies that
emerged from government-sponsored university research to create a
multi-billion dollar industry.
In other words, when Katz talks,
high-tech listens. He's long been interested in the seamless
integration of various wireless applications. For his previous research
project, Katz and his team figured out a way to make voice mail messages
instantly translatable into text-based emails (all of Cal's
Computer Science Department's research and software is freely
distributed). The SAHARA Project emerged from the assumption that the
wireless universe will never be
homogenous.
Research Model, Business
Model
"It's
that whole 'Microsoft, uber alles' attitude that doesn't
make sense" says Prof. Katz. "There's too much division
in software frameworks. The world is not going to have a single
architecture for supporting services. Everything - phones, PDAs, laptops
- are going to be connected to lots of different access networks. We
wanted to work towards an inter-working across lots of different access
technologies inside the network."
What SAHARA strives to
achieve is an architecture that allows smooth end-to-end services, even
when the two parties, in Katz's words, "don't trust each
other. Suppose there were Japanese tourists attending the Winter
Olympics in Salt Lake City who use NTT DoCoMo as their carrier. They
should be able to call up information about, say, Japanese restaurants
in Salt Lake by using a Zagat-type service. That would involve a series
of agreements between DoCoMo, a local carrier like Sprint, and a
translating service like Babel Fish, with NTT assembling all the
pieces."
The SAHARA project leaders envision a kind of
brokering landscape similar to the trading markets used to buy and sell
energy and other commodities. Perhaps a carrier whose spectrum capacity
is straining to overflow will be able to lease, on a short-term basis,
spectrum from a carrier who might be carrying too much for its current
needs. Or two companies can pool their resources to build one antenna
for both carriers. In other words, the current top-down, hierarchical
model would be replaced by a peer-to-peer model.
"You're starting to see phone operators going after
different markets," says Katz. "Virgin might be focusing on
teens, AT&T may be targeting business users. They're not gonna
use spectrum resources at the same time. A day trading-based environment
would make sense in this context."
But as the Enron debacle
has shown, trading can be manipulated if it isn't monitored
properly. That is one of the loopholes SAHARA is still grappling with.
"You need adequate logging capabilities to monitor the
trading," says Katz. "We are very aware of that, and
we're thinking carefully about making it fair and
verifiable."
Democratizing the
Airwaves
For Katz, the SAHARA project could lead to
a greater democratization of wireless, in which the old monolithic
ISP's and service carriers will have to share space in their
playgrounds, or else be relegated to the margins. 802.11b Wi-Fi, with
its relatively cheap hardware and low access cost, is the ideal
environment for what SAHARA wants to achieve.
"We're
starting to see a new hierarchy of business models that would admit more
of this dynamic modeling," says Katz. "Wi-Fi employs hot spots
in different places, like airports, Starbucks, hotels. Now, with
companies trying to aggregate connectivity across these ISP's, you
can have some kind of auction for access going on between
them."
The balance of power will fall to, say, the small
business owner, who can offer his access to the highest bidder. "A
café owner may offer a portion of his access to different
companies," says Katz. "This kind of economics-based incentive
for dynamic assembling of a coverage area is more likely to happen with
Wi-Fi than with something like 3G, which is more expensive and uses
dedicated spectrum."
In this kinder, gentler wireless
world, wireless operators would function as a kind of clearing house for
assemblers: Your Sprint bill, in other words, would aggregate all of the
charges for your monthly wireless services, regardless of what services
you might have used. Katz says that many of the major carriers are
closely watching the SAHARA project to see how they might be able to
apply it to their business models. "They're trying to
understand what it means to them." he says.
Looks like it
could mean an awful lot, as it turns out - and sooner than they
think.
It's Mobile Research Week on
TheFeature! Check back daily for reports, analysis and in-depth articles
about the wireless research
community.
Marc Weingarten is
an LA-based writer whose work appears in Business 2.0, The Los Angeles
Times, Smart Business, Entertainment Weekly, The Village Voice, Vibe
and San Francisco magazine.