Single Point of Failure (Comms)

Large business-critical systems can be brought down by power failure. My previous post looked at Airlines. This time we turn our attention to Telecommunications.

If someone said you had to accept an unreliable electricity supply as the price of innovation in appliances, you'd laugh. #NotNeutrality

— Martin Geddes (@martingeddes) August 8, 2016

More misery for BT broadband users after new power cut. Looks like 'no single point of failure' is an alien concept. https://t.co/mOobFidWe4

— Chris Tripp (@ChrisJTripp) July 21, 2016

It would be interesting to know where the single point of failure was in their power protection plan. https://t.co/zuaTm1z4tK

— Robin Koffler MBA (@robin_koffler) July 21, 2016

2G and 3G data services from @EE are down after a power outage. Details: https://t.co/zEJFpgpl4n pic.twitter.com/vcUOkPVtet

— The Register (@TheRegister) September 2, 2016

Obviously a power cut is not the only possible cause of business problems. Another single-point of failure could be a single rogue employee.

That shows that management should look at automating network. Since Network is single point of failure. https://t.co/ND5UXtNntj

— Anurag Kaushik (@kaushikanuk) August 3, 2016

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Gavin Clarke, Telecity's engineers to spend SECOND night fixing web hub power outage (The Register, 18 November 2015)


Related Post: Single Point of Failure (Airlines) (August 2016)

Pay As You Drive

Norwich Union has been experimenting with Pay-As-You-Drive insurance for a little while now, and has now made this service generally available to UK drivers, in association with technology company TrafficMaster, which provides the satellite navigation devices. [Norwich Union website, TrafficMaster website, BBC News report]

PAYD is an interesting application of the concept of differentiated context-aware services. Drivers pay a variable amount for car insurance, depending on the identity of the driver (under 23s pay more than older drivers) and the context (daytime versus nighttime, motorway versus town) as well as the number of miles driven.

This kind of differentiated service not only reduces the cost of insurance for some drivers, but also allows the driver a greater level of control over the insurance bill - by driving less. PAYD may also have a beneficial effect on road congestion and pollution.

However, although Norwich Union has evidently gone to some trouble to explain and manage the differences between regular insurance and PAYD, drivers adopting this kind of insurance will have to deal with some new complications, and I think we can expect the scheme to evolve further. For example, the arrangements for driving outside the UK seem unsatisfactory, and we may perhaps expect the emergence of the equivalent of "roaming charges" as insurers in other countries adopt similar or interoperable schemes.

Norwich Union has also gone to some trouble to deal with some of the security and privacy concerns of the scheme. The in-car device itself contains no data that can identify the driver or the vehicle. The data are encrypted for transmission, and then deleted from the in-car device. Not bad, although probably not perfect. (I haven't done a detailed analysis.)

However, the privacy issues are unlikely to deter many consumers. Context-aware services often involve some voluntary trade-off between privacy and consumer value. The consumer grants the service provider access to some personal information (such as consumption patterns), and gets some value in return (such as more precisely targetted special offers). PAYD is no different in that respect from any other scheme that permits the service provider (retailer, airline, credit card) to collect and process large quantities of consumer data.

It is going to be interesting to see the popularity of this kind of scheme, and the willingness of consumers to accept some level of complexity and strangeness, if they are convinced that this will give them a more cost-effective and (at least partially) user-controlled service.

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Related Posts

Pay As You Drive 2 (June 2008)
Pay As You Drive 3 (June 2009)

Differential Regulation

The economic questions of payment and cross-subsidy are highly relevant to the service economy, so here is an item cross-posted from the Business Organization Management blog.

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In some industries, economic questions of payment and cross-subsidy arouse strong passionate arguments, while in other industries these same questions arouse very little interest.

For example, Martin Geddes contrasts telecom with retail.

Telecom isn’t the only industry with distribution bottlenecks, significant market power, and cross-subsidy between the stages of production. Just look at how baked beans are positioned in supermarket shelves. Manufacturers in the UK pay the supermarkets to buy prime positions. Yet telecom incites such great passion in intelligent people. Baked beans don’t. What’s going on?

Martin explains this difference in political terms. Telecoms (along with media and internet) are implicated in democracy and participation, whereas baked beans aren't.

There is another possible explanation in historical terms. Telecoms used to be huge state monopolies, retail used to be hundreds of thousands of tiny independent stores. This is why the public and the regulators pay closer attention to telecom than to retail. (A long delay between cause and effect is easily explained in systems terms.)

And we don't have to choose between these explanations, since they don't actually contradict one another - so they may both contribute to the observed difference. (Multiple explanation is common in social systems.)

So what aspects of business does a society choose to regulate? This is an extremely interesting and complex question, with economic, ethical, social and political threads.

Technorati Tags: regulation

Local Loop Unbundling

The UK telecom regulator Ofcom published a long-awaited report last week, widely seen as a further challenge to BT's near-monopoly over the local telecoms network. Ofcom's action is partly triggered by a view of technological change, leading to a key forking point: BT opportunity versus regulator opportunity.

Technological change	"There is a fundamental change going on from a technological point of view. If that had not been going on, Ofcom might not have been so keen to come up with a brand new regulatory framework."	Emma Gilthorpe, head of regulatory affairs at Cable & Wireless (BT's biggest rival)
BT opportunity: dominance	"Rival operators stressed that they did not want BT to make life more difficult for them by adopting a closed path with its new network which would allow it to leapfrog its rivals on technology and cost structure."	Mark Page, head of telecoms at A.T. Kearney
Regulator opportunity: equivalence	"It's a timely intervention. The whole network is being built from scratch so it is an ideal opportunity to design it with 'equivalence' in mind."	Richard Sweet, head of regulation at Thus.

All quotes taken from report "The New Age of Communication: Ofcom forces BT to overhaul and open up" by Robert Budden in the Financial Times, November 20th 2004.

Ofcom's actions have already driven a wedge between BT Retail and BT Wholesale, and create an internal conflict of interest inside BT. For example, if BT Retail were to invest in local loop unbundling, it would be able to compete more vigorously with rival telecoms retailers, but this would damage revenues at BT Wholesale.

From the point of view of the service-oriented enterprise, this is an extremely important issue. The design (geometry) of the service network - how services are bundled or unbundled, where the added-value is created and controlled - becomes a strategic issue across the industry, and a matter for close regulatory scrutiny. In regulated industries, the players look to get maximum advantage within a given set of constraints, while also lobbying for advantageous regulatory changes. In unregulated industries, the players simply look to get maximum short-term and long-term advantage. In both cases, the design of business services is now much too important to be regarded as merely a matter of technical efficiency, to be delegated to technological specialists; it is now (more clearly than ever) a matter for the business itself, affecting the profitability and sustainability of the business as a whole.

Mobile Computing

One of the things that interests me about mobile computing are the architectural implications of decoupling. If speech is even a possibility for the medium term, then anything speakable needs to be put into a separate layer. (Does this mean that the remaining layers are unspeakable?) Just as, if there is a possibility that someone will be accessing your business process via a WAP phone, then you may need to reconsider precisely what aspects of the application should be isolated into the interface layer. (Thus it's not enough simply to label the layers of an architecture - it's necessary to specify the contents of each layer to some degree of precision. This is a question of stratification.)

New technologies potentially expose the limitations of yesterday's architectures. Structures that we thought were technology-independent turn out to have unexplored technical assumptions. We need to develop more robust structures and solutions, which would be more capable of accommodating tomorrow's technologies.

Speech recognition raises the question - where is the conversion going to be? We might expect a long debate on the relative advantages of fat phones (where the speech/data conversion and a fair amount of processing is done in the handset) and thin phones (where everything is done at the server end). But for me one of the lessons of the client/server saga was that much too much time was wasted trying to determine and fix the optimum degree of client fatness; and of course a lot of software architects now regret past decisions on fatness/thinness. In my view, what makes more sense is to structure a solution so that the fatness/thinness is itself isolated from the rest of the solution and can be varied tactically - we should be able to migrate functionality to and from the handset as the costs and point technologies change over time.

One of the key pieces of functionality that could be placed in the telephone handset (supported by the telco) is your identity service. When I ring my insurance company, my telephone might already knows my customer number, as well as the various policies I hold with this company. This would short-cut a lot of the automatic menus I currently have to pass through before talking to a callcentre employee. My phone might even be able to perform some degree of authentication on my behalf. Vodaphone is now offering a service called m-pay, where your credit card details are held securely at the server end and don't have to be spoken or sent when you buy something over the phone.

What we can celebrate is that some of the old strategic concerns have gone away. Voice versus data (or pictures). Fat versus thin. Microsoft versus IBM. Microsoft versus Sun. Pay-by-bank versus pay-by-phone. These are ceasing to be strategic issues, and are now becoming merely tactical. The strategic issues are now somewhere else.

CBDI Telecoms Report
More discussion on the fat/thin client issue

Service Hazard

Since BT’s monopoly of directory services was removed earlier this year, there have been lots of competing directory services in the UK, all with the 118 prefix.

The quality of service has been generally poor, as reported by the Consumers Association (Which?) and the industry regulator (Oftel). A recent Oftel survey shows an average accuracy across the industry of only 62%.

Lesson One. Deregulation and competition doesn’t automatically guarantee quality or value for money.

Scottish telecoms company Thus, which the Oftel survey rated as one of the worst performers, has now withdrawn its 118 service.

Apparently, Thus had outsourced its 118 service to a competitor. Thus CEO Bill Allan complains that the service provider‘s own 118 service scored higher on the Oftel servey. In other words, it was able to deliver a higher quality of service to its own customers than to Thus customers.

In competitive situations, commercial success or failure may depend not only on absolute service levels, but on service levels relative to the competition. And in complex networks (although not in this case) you may need to do some network mapping (service modelling) to determine exactly where the competition lies.

Lesson Two. Effective service competition calls for sophisticated service level specification and management.