The Telecom Pundit

Great article online by Ari Bensinger in BusinessWeek on the potential of IPTV, but it questions when it will happen. On a large scale, not for a long time as the article suggests. When I have some time I’ll come back and walk through some simple math that shows the sheer size of the problem. Wiring up a large number of houses is no simple feat. And beware, when companies, whether cable or telco say they “pass a house” this isn’t the same thing as saying they have a drop to the house and can provide service … more on that later.

Passwords are supposed to keep our various accounts safe and secure, but many of us have so many passwords that we end up writing them down or reusing the same password for many if not all of our accounts. I recently came across an excellent open source password keeper named KeePass. Keepass runs on various flavors of Windows. It is a small self contained program that can easily be loaded on your computer without the need for supporting DLLs or other complexities. The actual password database is separate from the program so it can easily be backed up or stored in multiple locations. Of course, the password database is encrypted with a password of your choice.

While it is relatively easy to use, KeePass is also well documented with online help. The KeePass site is also very well done and informative. So for all of you that are looking for a better solution than a password protected excel file or the ubiquitous yellow PostIt, I highly recommend KeePass.

Great article in the Economist on the digital home. It can be found here. It points out a number of the issues with the concept of the digital home. First, no one is sure that consumers even want what many companies are pushing as the digital home. And in even if they are, it isn’t clear that the technology will be simple enough for consumers to use.

Neustar appears to be doing well. According to their recent earnings announcement they had record revenues for the second quarter and NeuStar expects revenue to grow in excess of 36% over 2004, to between $225 million and $235 million.

Several companies have initiated coverage of the stock, and most view it positively. This has resulted in a handsome payday for some executives at Neustar, as well as for Warburg Pincus. Warburg Pincus recently sold $530M of Neustar stock in a private sale according to filings.

I’ve commented regarding Neustar and their S-1 in several posts. As of June 29, 2005 it looks as though they are a publicly traded company (symbol NSR) and managed to raise $605M. Sounds like things went extremely well for them in terms of shares offered, money raised and offer price. I must say that I’m impressed with the folks that managed to figure out what Neustar does based on the S-1, but I’ve also found that their website provides some better explanations. However it would still seem to me that the NPAC revenue is split across all business categories as opposed to being contained completely in the Interoperability segment of their business.

Without the Domain Name System (DNS) there would be no Internet, and with out the global root DNS servers there would be no DNS system. To date, the US has played the leading role in administering and authorizing changes to the root DNS files. In remarks to the Wireless Communications Association (WCA) on June 30, 2005, Michael Gallagher, an Assistant Secretary at the Department of Commerce announced a set of U.S. principles on the Internet’s Domain Name and Addressing System.

It sounds as though many, despite admitting that the US has done a fine job at this role, would like to move the administration away from the US to another organization. For example the response of the Council of European National Top-Level Domain Registries (CENTR), has been to thank the US for a good job, but to encourage changes moving forward.

There are some good articles and feedback on this proposal around the net. What it comes down to is that previous US statements indicated that the US would give up some of this control. Of course, what is even more interesting, and is outlined in the linked artilce above, is that the United Nations is trying to figure out how they get into the picture.

I for one think that if its not broken, lets not fix it. Lets remember the reason why the US government is involved in the first place. The US government is involved because today’s internet grew out of work funded by the US government! While there are important standards organizations (e.g., the International Telecommunications Union (ITU)) within the UN System, I think that the global success of the Internet, and the IETF in creating the necessary standards, is proof enough that the UN isn’t needed to provide an umbrella framework for the success of the Internet. As a matter or fact, anyone familiar with the ITU standards process knows that it is a rather slow process dominated by input from national bodies which are basically forced to create a national concensus before bringing a position to the ITU. I’m not sure that this is the model that we want for the Internet.

Long live the Internet, and please, lets not fix things that aren’t broken.

John Gallant of Network World recently posted a piece regarding the time and money that various RBOCs (e.g., Verizon, SBC) are spending to prevent local municipalities from deploying and managing their own broadband networks. I agree with his lack of sympathy for the RBOCs on this issue, but I actually feel even more cynical with respect to the actions of the RBOCs in this area.

The RBOCs have taken almost any action that they could over the last decade to prevent their network from being opened to competition. In the end they have been successful in their strategy and as a result both AT&T and MCI have been forced to give up on local access and be acquired by the RBOCs.

With the recent Supreme Court ruling regarding the NCTA vs Brand X, it is likely that the RBOCs will push even harder to close their local access networks from competition by claiming that DSL service is no different than cable modem service and as a result their DSL network should be closed to competition. Of course companies like Earthlink are disappointed with the ruling but they also claim to have no worries. But let’s face it, if they said they had a concern about their business their stock would plummet to just north of zero from the $9.24 it is at today. Clearly the future is in broadband access and the only ones that have control over the access infrastructure are the RBOCs and the cable companies. While satellite and powerline technologies are always mentioned as competitive threats by the telcos, they really provide little or no threat. Satellite technology scales poorly. And does anyone know of a single commercial deployment of broadband access over powerlines?

What I’ve enjoyed even more are the promises that the RBOCs have made with respect to upgrading their networks to broadband. As others have stated, the RBOC promises to deploy broadband have simply been a ploy to remove regulation. Most recently they’ve used the promise to deploy broadband as a way to ensure that they will not have to open any newly deployed infrastructure to competition. While I thought I was the only one this skeptical it turns out that the New Network Institute has been tracking the RBOC promises in this area since 1992. So far they haven’t been impressed with the promises. A final question. If the RBOCs deploy a broadband network and competitors don’t have access to it do you really think that the RBOCs will maintain the copper twisted pair network for the benefit of their competitors, like Earthlink?

The top five generic top level domains (gTLDs) are .com, .net, .org, .info and .biz The “dot biz” top level domain is managed by Neustar. Based on information from Webhosting.info the .biz TLD has the fewest number of registered hosts - slightly more than 1 million of the 5 most popular gTLDs. As of early June 2005 there were about 76.9M domain names registered in total. The .biz domain represents about 1.5% of all registered domain names.

BIZ 1,172,013

Based on Exhibit F of Neustar’s Registrar Agreement, Neustar collects $5.30 per .biz registration per year, which means that their .biz business generates about $6.2M per year.

Neustar also manages the .us, kids.us, .cn (China) and .tw (Taiwan) domains. For the .us domain Neustar charges $5.50 per year according to Exhibit F of the usTLD ADMINISTRATOR-REGISTRAR AGREEMENT. There are 315,215 dot us domains according to DaomainWroldwide, which means that the dot us business is about a $1.73M per year business.

Based on a recent Verisign report, China has approximately 504,876 domain names. This could represent another $2.5M in business.

The most complete source of registered domain names is found at DomainWorldwide but I must note that the numbers here vary significantly from other numbers I found and for the most part they appear to be understated.

For .tw the count is:
com.tw: 93,480
idv.tw: 18,221
edu.tw: 4,048
net.tw: 3,768
total .tw: 107,973

Again, this could result in ~$0.5M per year in revenue.

So, how big is Neustar’s the domain name business based on this data? Lets total it up:
.biz: $6.2M
.us: $1.73M
.cn: $2.5M
.tw: $0.5M
Total: $10.93M

So, there is $130M for US number portability, about $7M for Number administration and pooling, and $10.93M for domain names. My guess is that there is about another $7M for number portability in Canada. So, that totals to about $154M, which leaves about $11M for “other businesses” based on these calcuations from publicly available data.

Today the Supreme Court made two rulings that could have significant impact on the communications industry in the US. The first, the NCTA vs. Brand X has to do with cable companies opening their cable modem infrastructure to competitors. The justices ruled 6 to 3 that cable companies did not have to open their infrastructure to competitors. In the second case, MGM Studios vs Grokster, the court ruled unanimously against Grokster and said that Grokster and similar services could be sued for facilitating illegal file sharing.

More after I get a chance to read the opinions first hand.

Recently while at Supercomm2005 I sat down at the Sylantro booth for a presentation. I did so for two reasons. First, and foremost, I was tired of walking around. I had some customer meetings that afternoon and I had been carrying my laptop and copies of my presentation with me while I walked the floor. The second reason I sat down was because I thought I’d learn a little more about Sylantro.

It turned out that the presentation was not by Sylantro, but a Sylantro partner Laszlo Systems. Laszlo provides a very interesting open source solution, based on flash, for creating Rich Internet Applications (RIA). The technology basically lets you create browser based applications that behave like native desktop applications. Basically what this means is that you can “do things” without having to suffer through page refreshes. Earthlink will be releasing a new version of its web based email and it will be based on Laszlo’s software. Sylantro’s communications portal will be based on Lazslo’s technology.

The OpenLaszlo developer site has great information for application developers. In additon, they have a web site, Blogbox, that provides exciting “plug-ins” for your blog or Web site. On the Blogbox site they provide “plug-ins” or “rich intenet applications” that provide weather, audio, picture and clock functionality. The clock in the right sidebar of this website is an example of one of the “plug-ins” that they provide on www.blogbox.com I highly encourage you to visit the Blogbox site and try the weather application.

A google search on AJAX will provide some additional information on RIA technologies, (like that used in gmail, and google maps), but this is one of the best that I’ve seen.

The Laszlo presenter was Lyndon Wong who also has a blog that can be found here.