McGee's Musings

	Friday, May 03, 2002

DPR at 8:48 PM [url]:

Serviceless networking

The words we use often make it hard to think clearly. Though the "horseless carriage" quickly gave way to the automobile, the use of "wireless" to describe radio networks illustrates how people get stuck in old habits that makes it difficult to see change.

The Bell System sold a "service", not the equipment that provided it. That required the ownership of a huge amount of capital, and investors required a return on that capital. It wasn't until the 1970's that people began to see that the service was a straitjacket on innovation.

The Internet is not a "service", nor is it created by a company. You can argue what to call the Internet (a standard, an architecture, a collective project, ...) but it is not a service (despite what the FCC is trying to say lately in classifying the "internet service on cable" as an "information service"). Most of the industry successes in the Internet understand that - Cisco, UUNet, Earthlink, Amazon. Whatever product or service they sell, it is not the Internet. The Internet is something they exist in relation to, not a service.

Yet when we start talking "wireless" it is assumed that we must have a "service" and a company to buy "it" from.

Wireless LANs are a combination of signalling schemes using electromagnetic fields (remember there is not even an "ether" out there), and equipment that understand those schemes and implement protocols.

There is no obvious reason we need to think about radio Internet as a "service" provided by company. It is just something that companies relate to. Various pieces of capital equipment may be operated as a service, in the sense that Internet has "access provider services" and "backbone services", but people like Boingo are no more than a "billing service" for "access providers", and not a "wireless service".

We may be better off if we discard the archaic terminology entirely. Stop talking about wireless Internet, wireless LAN, radio services, ...

Boingo and Joltage may or may not succeed, but they are not selling radio networks - they are selling login identifiers and billing systems.

802.11b is not a radio service - it is a protocol used among a set of digital radios.

One can communicate over a network without a service. Perhaps we should call this "serviceless networking", but I prefer to call it the Internet. [SATN.org: Comments from Frankston, Reed, and Friends]