In order to get its competitive juices flowing again, infotech needs a metric quantifying the price performance of broadband. Before the Internet crashed the party in the 1990s, the infotech industry spent a decade obsessing about the metric known as MIPS — Millions of Instructions Per Second (or, according to some, Meaningless Indicators of Performance). Digital Equipment’s $100,000 VAX platform, which sported a single MIPS, dominated the landscape circa 1980. MIPS comparisons, albeit flawed, served as the basis for a competition that DEC lost to Intel and AMD.
Given that the average talking Hallmark greeting card probably consumes more than a single MIPS and the $600 PC used by a typical 16-year-old to post videos on Facebook sports an Intel Core Duo chip capable of 27,000 MIPS, the tracking of MIPS no longer generates much excitement.
While the availability and performance of connectivity represents the primary input gating progress today, the hunt for broadband still lacks an equivalent metric.
The telco-influenced FCC (laughably) defines broadband as anything capable of 200Kbs in one direction. By way of comparison, Cisco-backed TechNet proposes a goal of 100Mbps by 2010. The engineers at DEC likely viewed 100 MIPS as ambitious in 1980, but static goals (whether anemic or ambitious) will not produce continuous industry growth. Rather than trying to define the destination, MIPS-like metrics provide a measure of progress. Growth in the infotech industry follows continuous progress in processing power, memory, storage and various other inputs, not an arbitrary goal.
The telco bandwidth mavens will strenuously resist attempts to frame connectivity as a commodity like processing power. Telco CEOs subscribe to the Carl Sagan school of counting in which deploying broadband involves “billions and billions” of dollars. However, compare the $20 billion Verizon proposes to spend deploying fiber to 20 million homes to the $200 billion SBC CEO Whitacre spent cornering the market for copper infrastructure via acquisitions of Pacific Telesis, Ameritech, SNET, and BellSouth. CEO Whitacre could have accomplished far more using his billions to connect every home in the U.S. to fiber.
The continuous improvement challenge depends on the 20 percent of costs associated with termination equipment. The labor-intensive deployment of outside plant infrastructure represents a fixed cost with an upgrade cycle of a decade or more. Equipment vendors already deliver Moore’s Law-like annual cost performance improvements, but there exist insufficient competitive forces to motivate upgrades.
The success of Intel over the years provides a counterexample to the argument that commodity status destroys the prospects for profit. In fact, the present telco vs. cableco connectivity duopoly might operate in the same way as the Intel vs. AMD duopoly that arose out of the hunt for MIPS dominance.
Verizon’s relatively weak traction with FiOS video illustrates the risks of trying to fund infrastructure by selling services; it should take a cue from Intel, which pushes the risk of finding the killer app onto others. But a change in sentiment among telecom CEOs will prove slow in arriving. Abundant broadband enables VoIP apps and the next YouTube that compete with the legacy voice and video services generating a majority of telco and cableco revenue.
Change will require the infotech industry to get directly involved in the delivery of broadband. Creating the connectivity version of MIPS can provide a start. Maybe infocom can repurpose the MIPS acronym to make it relevant for broadband – M______ I_______ P_______ S_______? Any suggestions? Please send them in.
2010? I’m reading this on my home 100Mb/s connection right now, which is the norm over here in east Asia (which just goes to prove your point).
Million Incoming bytes Per Second.
or
Megabytes Injected Per Second
The first thing popup in my mind is that it’s that those telco/cableco should be a way more aggressive investor in VC funds to:
1) creating more Internet apps that would require higher connection;
2) getting involved into business model question early on so that create the best synergy;
3) identifying next thing such as WiMax early on to avoid being a sudden phase-out;
How about MovIes Per Second. Where 1 movie is 2 hours of uncompressed 1080P content.
This is a confusing column. What do you feel is intuitive or easily-understandable about MIPS, but not bps? You take issue with the FCC’s lower bound for defining broadband connections, which is fine. But rather than raising the lower bound, you want to invent a whole new metric. Why?
Disparishun,
The column makes a distinction between the present mode of calling for broadband bandwidth “targets” versus a measure of “progress” like MIPS. Does it make sense to have a target amount of processing power? No. Ditto connectivity. Bps seems like only a partial answer. It does not make explicit the need two-way connectivity. We also need to deal in larger units than bps. Broadband exists in a number of different contexts like wired, fiber, wi-fi, 3g, etc that the ideal metric might make it easier to unify.
sigh. Okay, having been in the web hosting industry for years, it drives me crazy when people talk about megabits per second and don’t get the acronyms right! It’s Mbps, not Mbs. PLEASE fix this.
Secondly, the easiest acronym would be Megabits of Information per Second, but I don’t see what that would do that “Mbps” doesn’t (as long as people use the correct acronym!)
ericabiz,
Thanks for pointing out the typo. It’s been fixed.
best, Carolyn
Eh, I think this exists to some degree alreay. I see dozens of commercials a day from Comcast where talking turtles tell me how much faster Comcast cable modem service is than DSL. The real problem is not that we have no metric — we do, Mbps — it’s that cable and telcos hardly care to play the game. The reason MIPS worked is because products from DEC and IBM or Intel and AMD were equally available to anyone with money. Not so broadband. It matters little if FiOS is faster than cable if I can’t get it. You can’t have competition without competitors — not really an applicable term for most telcos and cablecos.
I agree that we have a perfectly fine metric. The key with the Intel analogy is that Intel used its massive, rebate fuelled steroid marleting muscles to promote the Mhz as a standard so long as it suited Intel. Mbps will become a standard when someone decides to live and die with the metric and has the financial power and marketing savvy to turn it into a standard.
I can see why people are hesitant. Unlike Intel there is no overwhelming fundamental control of a technology and its iterative performance cycles. In fact the ability for a startup to come out of nowhere with speed boosts and turn over one’s careflly laid plans always exists in the insane business of telecoms. I mean how many times have they predicted the death of Copper?
Perhaps Cisco needs to spend some of the dollars its using to buy back its own stock to establish this as a standard. I mean who cares if some players win or lose this war, every consumer who buys into Mbps as a standard and lets it influence their purchase decision positively is a win for Cisco indirectly. (Disclaimer – I work for them)
MIPS = Metro I(nternet) P(rotocol) Service (1gbps+)
I’d like to see some standard ‘broadband” hopefully revolving around Ethernet @ 100mbps or better..
Indian government defines broadband as anything above 64Kbps. Although luckily MTNL & BSNL (one of the largest telco), provide 2MBps ADSL connections, with various plans of different download limits!
I am liking Mean Internet Protocol Service as broadband MIPS with the basic unit of 100Mbps. The Mean part can get quantified by a standar calculation that captures effective throughput in both directions.
Habib has a point in the heavy lifting required to evangelize the idea of broadband MIPS. Getting a Cisco size player engaged would be nice, but we can all do our part.
MIPS acronym for Telecom?
Make It Pay Soon.