From: Gordon Mohr (gojomo@usa.net)
Date: Thu May 11 2000 - 10:24:49 PDT
"A global citizens band wireless network... inexpensive, low-power
cellular antenna boxes... deployed in windows and on balconies by
average citizens... a global wireless economy of digits, where your
cell phone bill would equal the difference between the digits you
provide to the network and the digits you take away."
http://www.business2.com/articles/2000/05/content/vision_3.html
"If you'd like to help Jim grow the people's network, drop him an
email..."
# Let's Build the Parasite Network
#
# By Jim Griffin
# griffin@onehouse.com
# #
#
# A friend from Africa once related a proverb: When elephants
# fight, the grass suffers.
#
# It sheds light on why I feel trampled these days, dealing with
# countless competing communication technologies, especially in the
# United States. While most of the world floats happily along using
# one standard for cellular phones -- the Global System for Mobile
# Communication (GSM), which works in well more than a hundred
# countries -- Americans wade through at least a half-dozen varying
# standards, rivers that seem to run endlessly in parallel without
# ever converging.
#
# Wired is tired, but wireless is hopelessly mired, swamped so
# deeply in regulation and bureaucracy that the post office or
# cable company appears liberated by comparison.
#
# -sidebox-
# Adam Smith
# Eighteenth-century author of The Wealth of Nations. He argued,
# among other things, that an "invisible hand," or guiding force,
# leads individuals seeking their own economic gain to act in ways
# that also benefit society. Unregulated competition, he therefore
# concluded, works best for everyone.
# -sidebox-
#
# Adam Smith's invisible hand should be allowed to masterfully
# manipulate market opportunities like these. In Europe the cold
# winter has already brought a spring-like thaw of thinking in how
# to organically grow a global market for wireless data.
#
# Recently, my business partner and I imagined a global citizens
# band wireless network, a Linux-like viral invention that could
# jump-start progress toward one network. The notion arose one
# dreamy afternoon: We could sell cellular infrastructure the way
# we sell mobile phones, and to the same people. We'd build
# inexpensive, low-power cellular antenna boxes that share network
# capacity through DSL, cable modem, and other underutilized
# network connections.
#
# Deployed in windows and on balconies by average citizens, our
# antenna boxes would either create a global system from scratch,
# or fill holes in the patchwork of cell sites that currently seem
# to work only where they're needed least.
#
# Ultimately, the concept could lead to a global wireless economy
# of digits, where your cell phone bill would equal the difference
# between the digits you provide to the network and the digits you
# take away. Some might earn money this way, adding more capacity
# than they use, while others -- lacking the initiative or the means
# -- would simply pay.
#
# A Swiss-like idea
# We tested the idea first at our favorite debate tournament for
# technologists: the quarterly Technology Transfer Institute
# Vanguard meetings assembled by Len Kleinrock (see "Fathers of
# Invention," Oct. '99, p198), the UCLA professor who (on the day I
# started seventh grade) oversaw transmission of the first message
# on the Arpanet. TTI/Vanguard is a terrific place to try out a new
# idea, and this one was sufficiently anarchic to intrigue the
# crowd.
#
# Although the notion has a Swiss feel to it -- SwatchNet came to
# mind -- we resolved to devote part of our next visit to Helsinki
# to needling our Finnish friends, whose proprietary pride in home
# team Nokia competes with their national reverence for Linus
# Torvalds, father of Linux. Empower the user, not the network
# operator, we imagined telling them, and you'll really get this
# global wireless network humming.
#
# We thought they'd laugh politely and privately recoil in horror
# at the notion of disintermediating the very telephone
# infrastructure they built, maintain, and continue to expand. We,
# however, envision the huge gains to be made selling cell phones
# and cell sites together. Indeed, the idea would transfer to users
# the costs and barriers that restrict cellular network growth;
# costs related to power supply, real estate, and antenna
# maintenance. All that would remain is the stuff that profits are
# made of: switching calls, customer relationships, and billing.
#
# Suffice it to say, our plan was not new -- not in Finland, not
# anywhere in Europe. Wherever we went, digerati and digizens alike
# listened eagerly to us talk about breaking down market barriers
# built by countries and corporations (and that dying hybrid,
# national telephone companies). And in places where no one had yet
# conceived the notion, people readily embraced it.
#
# Indeed, the chief technologist at one large, traditional European
# phone company had already sketched out a version of our plan,
# dubbing it the parasitic network. He showed us conceptual charts
# covered with highways of Net-enabled automobiles creating fluid
# ribbons of wireless cellular connectivity.
#
# Although the global communications industry enjoys well more than
# a decade's head start in the race to produce a wireless world,
# Adam Smith's ideas might now be introduced to level the playing
# field.
#
# If a global citizens band wireless network arose, some say it
# could obliterate the lumbering elephants spawned by global
# communication deregulation. We're suffering under their rule.
# We're being trampled by their enormous feet. Vodaphone chases
# Mannesman. AT&T scraps with Sprint. Together with national
# governments, these mammoths have erected borders their phones
# cannot traverse.
#
# I'm banking that a million Business 2.0 readers can act to
# replace these cellular installers, that they can bring change to
# wireless the way the Web changed content delivery. Anybody game
# to give it a try?
#
# --
# Jim Griffin (griffin@onehouse.com), former director of the Geffen
# Records technology department, is CEO of Cherry Lane Digital and
# co-chair of evolab. If you'd like to help Jim grow the people's
# network, drop him an email at griffin@onehouse.com.
#
#
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