By Mary Lennighan, Total Telecom
Friday 13 March 2009
We celebrate the 20th anniversary of Tim Berners-Lee's proposal that became the Internet; plus this week's news highlights. "Vague, but exciting." The words used by Mike Sendall, Tim Berners-Lee's boss at CERN, to describe Berners-Lee's proposal for an information management system that evolved into what we now know as the Internet. That proposal was submitted 20 years ago today. 20 years – is that all? For me, the Internet seems to have been around forever. And spending my days as I do, working on the Total Telecom Website, life without the World Wide Web, as Berners-Lee eventually settled on calling it, is impossible to imagine.
Working with systems engineer Robert Cailliau, Berners-Lee developed what was at the time designed to be a single information network to enable physicists at CERN to share the information stored on their individual computers.
The pair came up with the name World Wide Web in May 1990 and set up Info.cern.ch as the world's first Web site. Servers outside of CERN sprang up the following year. In February 1993 the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA) released the first version of Mosaic, the browser that effectively brought the Internet to the masses.
A quick look at this week's news on the Total Telecom Website shows just how far we have come since then.
On Tuesday Google – arguably the Internet's greatest success story - admitted that its Web-based email service Gmail had suffered another outage, leaving an undisclosed number of users without access for
Meanwhile, CERN says the number of Websites in existence has risen to over 80 million.
Internet usage has certainly evolved over the past 20 years, at the same time throwing up legal issues that we could not have imagined at the start.
This week online video-sharing site YouTube, also owned by Google, revealed that it will start blocking access to premium music videos in the U.K., having failed to renew its licensing agreement with U.K. royalty body the Performing Rights Society for Music. ComScore tells us that YouTube is the leading online video site, having registered over 100 million viewers in the U.S. alone in January. Social networking is another phenomenon that noone could have predicted when the Internet was conceived. But now everyone's at it. Video site Hulu this week launched Hulu Friends in a bid to make its site stickier, and with the aim boosting advertising revenue.
And earlier this month Nielsen Online reported that social network is now the fourth most popular online activity, with sites visited by 67% of Internet users.
Online advertising has become big business too.
Earlier this week Google revealed a targeted advertising scheme that will enable it to tie online ads to users' interests. However, unlike the rivals that are further ahead on this road, Google is offering a set of user controls that will enable Web surfers to view and change the interest categories to which they have been assigned. The move was applauded by privacy campaigners.
Moving away from all things Web-based, there was a lot going on elsewhere in the telecoms industry this week, particularly in the mobile space.
On Tuesday a panel of EU lawmakers approved proposals to cap wholesale data roaming charges and SMS roaming rates.
The panel even went further than EU telecoms commissioner Viviane Reding had suggested, by agreeing on a €0.50-per-megabyte cap for wholesale data roaming; Reding had proposed a cap of €1.00.
The new measures will come into force this summer if the full EU parliament votes in favour next month.
There was talk of network consolidation in the U.K. mobile market, with the revelation that Vodafone and O2 are in advanced talks on a network-sharing deal.
While the operators could not confirm that such talks are taking place, they did not deny the rumours.
A deal between Voda and O2 would leave Orange in a strange position. The operator brokered a network-sharing agreement with Vodafone last year, although that deal has amounted to nothing more than sharing cell sites.
However, Orange is said to be keen to tie up with T-Mobile and 3, which have already pooled their network assets through their Mobile Broadband Network Ltd (MBNL) joint venture.
Meanwhile, Vodafone made the news again with the announcement that it will provide users with a DRM-free, device-agnostic music download service.
The operator will start selling DRM-free music in certain European markets and New Zealand this summer, with a wider rollout to follow.
Further afield, India's COAI revealed new statistics this week, reporting that the country reached 277 million GSM subscribers by the end of February. Growth was essentially flat compared with the previous month.
And a report from Chinese firm CCID predicted that China will become the world's largest 3G market by the third quarter of this year, despite its 3G rollout being still in the early stages. China will connect 660,000 3G users by Q3, with China Mobile's TD-SCDMA network accounting for almost half.
In the fixed-line space, cable operator Comcast became the third largest local telephony provider in the U.S. this week when it overtook Qwest in terms of subscribers.
Irish incumbent Eircom informed the government that it is rethinking its plans for a fibre network rollout, citing the difficult economic situation.
And in their latest joint report, Exane BNP Paribas and Arthur D Little warned fixed-line operators that although triple-play offerings have helped to stem line losses in Europe, they should not attempt to compete with pay-TV providers when it comes to premium content.
There was another sign that Nortel Networks will not emerge from bankruptcy as an intact business when reports emerged that the Canadian equipment manufacturer is in talks to sell its wireless equipment and enterprise businesses to rival players.
Turning to jobs, WiMAX operator Clearwire got a new CEO, naming William Morrow as a replacement for Benjamin Wolff.
And Australia's Telstra is believed to have identified a short list of fewer than 10 names for the position of chief executive, following Sol Trujillo's departure in June.
Former Vodafone executive Paul Donovan and BT Retail chief Gavin Patterson are on the list, according to the local press.
Finally, for those of you that are interested in seeing Tim Berners-Lee's original proposal for the Internet, you can find it on CERN's Website.
Mr Berners-Lee, we salute you. Without the Internet, I for one would be out of a job. Or I would be isolated from the world at a standalone PC, receiving press releases by fax and by post. And, horror of horrors, I might actually have to answer my phone sometimes.
And you, the readers of Total Telecom, would have to wait a lot longer to read about the comings and goings in the industry.
It just doesn't bear thinking about.
