Handcuffing the FCC

In a letter released Thursday Sen. Herb Kohl (D-Wis.) asked the two Congressmen who are overseeing the passage of the bill through the House and Senate to eliminate the provisions that strip the FCC of its ability to set rules about who and how wireless companies could bid in the hoped-for auction of TV spectrum. In recent weeks AT&T has gone into overdrive defending its efforts to stop the FCC from setting any rules that might limit AT&T’s attempts to bid for the hoped-for spectrum.

AT&T’s machinations are puzzling, since it has managed to pick up a considerable amount of spectrum under the rules that the FCC has set in previous years for auctions, and because it actually seems like it wouldn’t want a completely neutered FCC overseeing the wireless industry, especially given the amount of partisan bickering that can hold up its favored legislation in Congress. Sen. Kohl has other concerns that most consumers might share. In his letter he writes, “This essentially eliminates the FCC’s ability to conduct auctions in a way that maintains a competitive marketplace.”

After the FCC and the Department of Justice put the kibosh on AT&T’s attempts to buy T-Mobile on fears that it might harm mobile competition (and because the FCC claimed AT&T lied about job creation), one would think AT&T would lie low for a while instead of drawing the attention and possible ire of senators, several consumer watchdog organizations and most of the nation’s other carriers. Verizon has been silent on this issue so far, but I reached out to see if they wanted to address the rumors I hear that they, too, are lobbying to put legislation in that limits the FCC’s ability to limit who bids, but I haven’t heard back.

Here’s what should really frustrate Silicon Valley and broadband nerds.

Making it hard for existing mobile operators or upstarts to get the spectrum they need to compete against AT&T and Verizon is bad, but this bill also contains language that could kill or maim white spaces broadband before it’s even born. The legislation makes it impossible for the FCC to Allocate unlisenced spectrum in the TV white spaces — an issue I’ve written a lot about. Unlicensed spectrum is an important part of our daily lives, because those are the airwaves that Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, baby monitors and cordless phones operate in.

Heck, even wireless toys rely on that shared spectrum. And under a plan to create white spaces broadband, some of the airwaves between the digital TV bands were going to be used for fixed wireless broadband. That technology would provide a free over the air link to existing Internet pipes in homes, in the ground or in businesses. Unfortunately, under the proposed payroll legislation it’s looking like the FCC can’t even allocate any of those airwaves to unlisenced use at all — something 40 members of Congress wrote the heads of the Senate Finance Committee and the House Ways and Means Committee to protest on Thursday.

It’s frustrating when important technical issues become balls swatted around by Congress. Given the importance of passing this legislation, which is supposed to cut the amount of payroll taxes employees will pay, the inclusion of this language as a hope to cram it through without a public debate seems like a low blow at the FCC, consumers and broadband in general.

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.

• LTE-Advanced: what it is and isn’t
• Updated: Forecast: global mobile subscribers, 2010–2015
• The future of Wi-Fi in the enterprise

So for those of you planning a road trip, a move or who might want to avoid the lure of the web while on holiday, the map gives a big picture view at how much physical area of the U.S. isn’t connected via 3G –something that isn’t always apparent because carriers measure their coverage in terms of the percent of the population covered.

For an overview of some of the other measures the FCC is taking with regards to getting the 18 million rural Americans online who don’t have access to real broadband, check out the FCC’s blog posting on the topic. The final paragraph is probably worth noting for all you startups because it means your free conference call services that so hack off Ma Bell and even Google are protected.

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.

• U.S. Wireless Data Market: Q4 and Year-End 2008
• 12 tech leaders’ resolutions for 2012
• 2012: Data, spectrum and the race to LTE

Those five areas are switching and routing, the data center, collaboration, video, and architectures for business transformation. In the past year Cisco has done six acquisitions, with half of those occurring in the past three quarters while it was handling its restructuring. As we have documented, Cisco’s previous forays into M&A have helped the company spread its bets on emerging technology around, but they haven’t always helped it boost its bottom line. Cisco also had seemed to lose focus in previous years, letting other firms come into its market and take share.

Based on the financial results at the end of Cisco’s fiscal second quarter of 2012, the company has $46.7 billion available in cash and cash equivalents. It is profitable and is generating cash as well after completing its reorganization, which has cut $1 billion off its annual run rate. In response to questions about M&A strategy on the call, Chambers said that the acquisition strategy remains the same, buying companies with about 100 engineers and products close to coming to market that Cisco customers tell the company it should buy. He pointed to the acquisitions of Tandberg and Starent as good examples of deals and said that of all the large players out there making acquisitions only Oracle had a similar success rate as Cisco when it came to integrating deals.

If Cisco is back in the shopping mood, we have a few suggestions for places where it should start. It should go all-in on the cloud, which seems like where Cisco wants to focus anyhow.

Since software-defined networks and OpenFlow are clearly an emerging area in the networking space, Cisco should shell out money for a player in this space. Big Switch would be a good bet, as it is trying to create an ecosystem using open-source controllers and then focusing on building services and applications on top of that platform. The model is different for Cisco, but the focus on enterprise applications and services is one that would benefit Cisco and lead to higher margins.

As clouds are deployed, monitoring and tracking websites and application performance from within the network are important for Cisco and its enterprise clients, which is why New Relic could also be a good pick for the company. New Relic’s SaaS-based software monitors performance and tracks issues back to the data center to help enterprises or website owners pinpoint bottlenecks and problems.

If Cisco wants to go big, my colleague Derrick Harris suggests that NetApp might be a good buy, because it reduces Cisco’s reliance on EMC, a relationship that is rumored to be on the rocks. If it is not NetApp, any storage vendor with a strong virtualization story and promise in the enterprise would help bolster Cisco’s burgeoning server division as well as its storage networking lineup.

Given the array of startups bringing both intelligence and performance improvements to different areas of the network, there are plenty of opportunities for Cisco to pick up new customers, technology and market share by buying a startup or established company. Who do you think Cisco should snap up?

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.

• Infrastructure Q4: Big data gets bigger and SaaS startups shine
• Infrastructure Q2: Big data and PaaS gain more momentum
• The Structure 50: The Top 50 Cloud Innovators

Look ma! It's all so rich and dynamic.

Akamai said it purchased Canadian web site optimization company Blaze Wednesday, ahead of its financial results call. In acquiring Blaze, content-delivery network leader Akamai offers an excellent example of how the web is changing as we access it from more devices and as the nature of the web sites we visit changes. This small deal illustrates some big changes in the web.

Blaze, which was formed in 2010, offers a service that helps web sites load faster by optimizing the scripts running on the site. It also recommends clients add a content delivery network and complements the software and CDN mix with consulting services for folks that want to go further. The optimization happens on the backend on Blaze’s servers, so the consumer’s front end experience was faster and fitted to the device he was on at the time. Other companies in this space include Aptimize.

In buying Blaze, Akamai is acknowledging that web sites today are accessed in more places, something anyone who’s been in a Starbucks lately can tell you, but also that the sites themselves are different. They use richer media and offer links back to more applications. Things like sharing something on Twitter or liking it on Facebook via a simple button add seconds to load times and complexity to the overall site. Complicated CSS scripts and lagging ad networks don’t help either.

Blaze was a natural fit for Akamai in many ways as Akamai tries to take its CDN beyond the old days of static content delivery to delivering optimized advertising, helping bring content to mobile devices, and otherwise adapt to the application-heavy and real-time nature of the web. Where web sites were once comprised of fairly simple code optimized for one or two browsers, they’re now a mash up of many applications from different places being viewed on as many as 10 different browsers and platforms. Akamai is just trying to keep up.

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.

• 12 tech leaders’ resolutions for 2012
• The future of Wi-Fi in the enterprise
• Migrating media applications to the private cloud: best practices for businesses

In Chattanooga, Tenn. the creation of a gigabit network has led to the formation of an incubator that wants to attract startups to the city this summer to play around with the nation’s first gigabit network. I spoke with Jack Studer, the managing partner at Lamp Post Group, which is the incubator hosting the contest, on what kinds of applications might drive people to get a gig.

Studer explained that while consumer applications were fun, the lack of other gigabit networks around the country made it a bit difficult to justify building a startup or business that needs a gigabit connection. Even if Studer has the bandwidth to receive a massively fat 3-D holographic image of me for a video conference, I couldn’t reciprocate on my 60 Mbps cable connection (that really delivers 30 Mbps) so building a consumer 3-D holographic web conferencing business is probably a long shot. Other similarly bandwidth-intensive ideas are also out … for now.

“Startups that require a gig — well, that business plan would suck. It’s like building up a business based on teleportation. It doesn’t exist yet,” said Studer.

Where the gigabit network really shines is business productivity says Studer. He points out that he can do things between his offices in Chattanooga that are truly business-changing such as real-time and continual data backups and replication. And that’s just the beginning. Studer has ideas around connecting distributed compute nodes around the city that could essentially turn Chattanooga into a giant supercomputer.

Gigabit speed, and the fact that no applications today require such speeds, mean a variety of services that now run on the computer might run in the network instead without it affecting the end-user. That has implications for data processing and the creation of new services based on an intelligent network. Such services might even become necessary as we connect more devices to the network.

For example, if we have a smart home where our computers, CE devices and even our lighting or appliances are connected to the network, we have to think about securing all of those endpoints. The current model of having antivirus software sitting on a PC no longer makes sense, but what about putting it on the network? A fast network means one could run services such as antivirus on the network without the user noticing.

But to bring the future to life, Studer needs students, venture capitalists and entrepreneurs to come to Chattanooga to play around with the network. Who’s up for the challenge?

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.

• The future of Wi-Fi in the enterprise
• From car to cloud: the future of the in-vehicle app landscape
• NewNet 2012: companies and technologies set to disrupt

Surprisingly, the audience willing to spend big bucks to reduce latency by seconds –or milliseconds–might be larger than you could imagine. Solarflare’s background is in the world of high-frequency trading where milliseconds can cost millions, and large financial players were willing to shell out for Solarflare’s network cards. HPC networks and superfast academic networks are also customers.

On Tuesday the company added a new twist to its offering by adding a specially designed networking chip and middleware to its adapter cards that allows a customer to connect an application directly to the network. So for applications that need it, Solarflare’s new cards can allow a customer to process data coming in from the network in real-time. This is a big deal for its existing markets as well as for any company looking to process large amounts of data in real time.

The product called the ApplicationOnload Engine has a silly name, but its a powerful concept. It combines a specialty chip called an FPGA, with Solarflare’s adapter and with its middleware (see diagram) on a single card that can be slotted into servers. The whole package is designed to make programming the chip easier without sacrificing speed.

FPGAs were once common in the networking space, and vendors spent millions designing them to eke out performance gains for their gear. But while hardware offers faster performance, it’s a pain to program, which meant that FPGAs weren’t user-friendly or flexible. As general network services became more attractive than speed, network vendors tended to neglect the smaller market whose need for speed trumped general purpose networking.

Much like Arista, which serves that high-end market with its own switches and software, Solarflare is hoping to pick up business where the major players have left a hole. Russell Stern, the CEO of Solarflare, says Solarflare’s financial customers are ready to trust their networking applications to Solarflare after relying on the company’s cards for the last few years, which prompted the move into this next level of service.

Stern also sees a potential market in big data processing and even new use cases such as enabling social networks to conduct auctions to deliver real-time advertising at the moment when a user refreshes a page. Much like Fusion-io — which had conducted a successful initial public offering based on its premise that a large class of companies would pay for a separate adapter card that helped boost the speed of solid state drives and added intelligence – Solarflare is catering to a once-niche market that is growing and underserved by the larger vendors.

As we demand faster page load times, faster networks and faster transactions Solarflare is a natural beneficiary. Solarflare’s networking cards aren’t for everyone, but given our need for speed, the market is big enough and will only get bigger.

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.

• Infrastructure Q1: IaaS Comes Down to Earth; Big Data Takes Flight
• In Q3, Big Data Meant Big Dollars
• Infrastructure Q4: Big data gets bigger and SaaS startups shine

For those who lack the foresight to prepare in advance, or professionals such as doctors who have a tablet or handset and a need for variety of information on the devices, CoreMobile, a startup out of Santa Clara, Calif. wants to help. The company, which was founded two years ago and is a member of the Citrix Startup Accelerator, makes software running online that uses a phone’s location, a caller or even a calendar event to derive context and then deliver a multi-app view of relevant information on one screen.

CoreMobile wants to cram all these apps into one screen

I have no idea if this is the way we’ll access information in the near future — although Chandra Shekhar Tekwani the company’s CEO is excited that almost 300 paying enterprise customers are already using the beta product — but it’s certainly worth thinking about how to cram a large amount of information from different sources onto a small screen.

This is both a UI issue (how people access and interact with a lot of information in a small screen without being overwhelmed), but also a technical one. For example, how does one prioritize or manage API calls to ensure that a paying customers gets access to a feed of data that might be one or two hops away from the original app? As we enter a mobile first world, CoreMobile and other companies trying to deliver business-level applications on mobile devices that could offer us a glimpse of a connected future, one unconnected to the PC, but constrained by its own unique shortcomings.

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.

• Connected world: the consumer technology revolution
• What Amazon’s new Kindle line means for Apple, Netflix and online media
• From car to cloud: the future of the in-vehicle app landscape

However, it looks like those issues may finally be resolved with Google paying the same attachment fees that cable and telecommunications companies pay utilities to use their poles, as opposed to paying additional costs associated with stringing cable higher up on the pole where electricity cables hang. A Google spokeswoman confirmed that the fiber was getting strung, but couldn’t tell me what percentage of the network would be underground as opposed to aerial. She said via email, “We don’t have a percentage estimate but we’re starting on utility poles and down the line, the fiber-to-the-home connections will be terrestrial.” Fiber is far cheaper to deploy aerially than planted in the ground because it avoids the labor costs associated with digging trenches.

Google has said it would start signing up customers by the end of 2011 and that it would begin connecting customers in “early 2012.” If the company has just begun laying its fiber, that may push things back a bit. The project has experienced a few minor delays, but so far seems to be moving ahead. Rather than when, I’m actually far more curious about what Google’s network architecture will be and what it will cost.

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.

• Report: Monetizing Digital Content
• CES 2012: a recap and analysis
• 12 tech leaders’ resolutions for 2012

Details around the deal are limited, but here is what we know.

1. Verizon will own 65 percent of the joint venture while Coinstar, Redbox’s parent company, will own 35 percent.
2. The service will offer something Netflix currently doesn’t — a download option, which makes it more competitive with Amazon’s video offerings.
3. The offering will be available nationwide, not merely to Verizon customers.
4. Using Redbox helps the joint venture get access to new releases as content companies are trying to add more “windows” to the movie release process. Windowing is what content companies use to spread out the time between a movie released in theaters, when it hits rentals stores and when it makes its way to other services such as premium TV channels. The general thinking is this increases profits for each movie, but opinion is divided on that, and consumers hate it.
5. Verizon is counting on its existing relationship as a pay TV provider to get more content to the joint venture.
6. Whatever the end product looks like, it will launch in the second half of this year.

Given these facts, as scant as they are, it’s easy to see the threat to Netflix, as people could view the two offerings as fairly interchangeable as long as the pricing is competitive and the content is relatively equal. But without knowing about pricing or the content, the deal still has the potential to be a win for Verizon, given video is huge bandwidth suck on wireline and wireless networks. Netflix traffic was estimated to take up 20 percent of U.S. broadband traffic during peak hours according to Sandvine in the fall of 2010.

For Verizon, a streaming joint venture has three benefits. One, if it makes money from the service, that’s an additional revenue stream as well as a way to capture some value from its customers who cut the cord. Two, if the service can really deliver a video product that consumers love and will use, it will help drive traffic across Verizon’s networks. Customers in the FiOS areas will have a reason to sign up for the service if they haven’t already, while the joint venture will help drive traffic to mobile devices and other areas of the country. Verizon has a business selling bandwidth on 100 gigabit per second backbone pipes as well as leasing its fiber to cell phone providers to use as mobile backhaul.

Finally the joint venture gives Verizon a seat at the table with content companies as the industry tries to find new economic models based on the reality of an IP infrastructure that can deliver any content to anyone, anywhere. Sure, content companies are fighting the future with windowing and complicated rights agreements, while ISPs are trying to protect their business with broadband caps, but the future is coming, and Verizon is trying to get in on the ground floor rather than watch it pass it by.

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.

• Q4 Wrap-up: SOPA and the future of digital content
• Connected Consumer 2012: A year of consolidation and integration
• Connected world: the consumer technology revolution

Martin Casado, the CTO and co-founder of Nicira

Nicira, the networking startup that is not so stealthy but seriously hot, is ready to tell the world what it offers and who is buying its software. The list of customers is impressive. Nicira’s Network Virtualization Platform is used at eBay, NTT, AT&T, Fidelity Investments and Rackspace, and I expect more companies to announce their use of the networking virtualization solution in the coming months.

Nicira, the brainchild of Martin Casado, who gained fame in networking circles after his Stanford dissertation became the basis for the OpenFlow protocol, is backed with more than $50 million in funding from Andreessen Horowitz, Lightspeed Ventures and New Enterprise Associates. Diane Greene, the co-founder of VMware also contributed. Nicira’s founder, its funders and the technology space where it plays make it one of the hottest startups around.

The problem with virtualization

Nicira is one of several companies attempting to solve the problem that Greene helped create when she co-founded VMware to push hypervisors and virtualization. Once servers were virtualized, it created an easy way to separate computing from the physical infrastructure. The benefits of server virtualization were more-agile compute infrastructures — a developer would spin up a server in minutes as opposed to waiting days for approvals — as well as consolidating IT. Storage followed, but holding the whole virtualized infrastructure effort back was networking. Like a bird with its wings clipped, IT was tethered to the physical hardware by networking.

Server virtualization has made moving applications around on top of servers easy: Think of the transient nature of Amazon’s EC2 instances. But the challenges of maintaining the connection those servers must have to the underlying network has chained the cloud to physical infrastructures — to an IP address — and ensured that employees must manually reconfigure the network to make big changes or implement new networking policies associated with security or compliance. Solutions such as OpenFlow, a protocol that allows the suer to separate the intelligence inside switches from the packet routing and place that intelligence on commodity servers, has helped usher in the age of software-defined networks, which could help solve that problem.

Nicira’s secret sauce

Nicira’s products play into that, but they don’t require OpenFlow to work. Instead of requiring a special OpenFlow-enabled switch, its software works with a variety of protocols and hardware. The company starts by using the Open vSwitch network virtualization software inside the hypervisor. From its vantage point inside a VM thanks to Open vSwitch, Nicira understands data associated with that VM and communicates it to controllers running its software inside the data center.

These controllers are the data center equivalent of a post office box for each VM inside the data center. While the physical address of a virtual machine may change depending on demand, the Nicira controller knows where that VM is and can get messages to it. So, now, messages are sent to the controller, and, like mail sent to a P.O. box, the recipient gets it, no matter where she may physically live.

Agility, cloudbursting and follow-the-sun data centers, oh my!

The infrastructure is worth explaining, but the real excitement is found in how Nicira’s customers are using the product. NTT, which operates data centers around the world, uses Nicira’s software to move its desktop-as-a-service offering from data center to data center within Tokyo ahead of rolling brownouts in the wake of the Fukushima nuclear disaster. That’s right, we are talking about cloudbursting — or moving workloads on the fly from one data center to another. Of course, many caveats still apply.

Both data centers need Nicira controllers, as well as the data the application needs to use in order to run. Casado notes those data centers also need to be connected by pretty fat pipes with low latency to deliver something like NTT’s desktop-as-a-service application. However, customers could use it for cloudbursting if they have already prepopulated a second data center with the information the application needed.

E-commerce giant eBay is using it to deploy applications in minutes as opposed to days, since network engineers no longer have to manually configure networks to meet the needs of a developer. Rackspace is using it to change the products it can offer as a hosting company as well as add agility to its Infrastructure-as-a-Service offerings.

While Nicira’s coming-out party is a big deal for the new age of networking, it is by no means the only player seeking to free cloud computing from the confines of the physical network. Startups such as ConteXtream, Embrane, Big Switch and others are seeking to play a role in the networks of tomorrow. With customers having tested and deployed its platform into production environments, five-year-old Nicira seems further along than some of its fellow startups, but this is a big opportunity and there is still plenty of room.

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.

• Migrating media applications to the private cloud: best practices for businesses
• The Structure 50: The Top 50 Cloud Innovators
• Dissecting the data: 5 issues for our digital future

But adapting and innovating in IT requires that you have a platform strategy that allows for heterogeneous adoption of technology at each layer of infrastructure. You also need simplified, cost-effective, real-time access to a wide range of partners and solution providers, otherwise known as your technology ecosystem. This group of providers will be a veritable marketplace of vendors that are proprietary and open source, but whom together create a combination of technologies and services that allow the buyer to mix and match for any solution requirement.

The technology ecosystem has always been important. Even in the days when a minority of companies had a single mainframe, you still needed parts, skills, power, data centers, tools, and ideas, etc. But that ecosystem was smaller and moved more slowly. The technology ecosystems of the 60s through the 90s tended to change over months or years, and our systems from then were more likely to be from a small handful of vendors. This simplified provider environment reduced dependence on an ecosystem of otherwise unrelated partners and vendors, but guaranteed your dependence on the one.

That was then, this is now.

The difference today, and going forward, is that technology is rapidly moving to a much more agile adoption, development, operating and use model. Buyers today can identify and use cloud-based infrastructure or obtain a few licenses of a Software-as-a-Service delivered application in a matter of hours. Aside from cloud-based services, there are virtual platforms, appliances, internally developed applications and myriad customer devices that all need to interact, but can change almost overnight.

Some would argue that the sheer complexity of the ecosystem today screams for CIOs to try to create homogenous infrastructure environments. However, the very fact that we’re making IT solutions more portable and readily adaptable means that we must plan for the ability to support multi-vendor solutions at any layer of the technical infrastructure, from the CPU, through to platform as a service.

The rapid delivery of new solutions means that companies will no longer wait patiently for “their” provider to catch up to major innovation leaps. The only way to stay in front of your competition is to grease the technical infrastructure skids with strong management platforms and clear adoption, ownership, and orchestration strategies.

Many software, cloud, and hardware providers in today’s market would argue that they offer a strong ecosystem of partners, but I think the future ecosystem will be as open as possible and also offer the customer access to a wide variety of cloud, network and other services within the confines of a single data center. Think of your IT ecosystem as the local shops near your downtown flat, easy to access and well understood. However, if you’re downtown ecosystem was like the technology ecosystem you would have five coffee shops, three butchers, six shoe stores and so on from which to select goods and services. .

The open ecosystem

An open ecosystem allows for you to select the technology or service provider you like when the opportunity presents itself. It’s an environment where the customer has broad access to vendors and services related to any portion of the infrastructure stack, including wide area networking services and the data center capacity.

Under the old way of building IT, managers built it once, built it to last, and then got fired when it didn’t last. The new IT calls for managers to build it fast, possibly fail fast, and then build it again.

An open ecosystem means that in most cases you shouldn’t be spending years putting in a new technology architecture or solution. If it’s that complex or limited in its ability to adapt new technology you should be using a partner’s infrastructure such as an IaaS or PaaS provider solution.

There are also many options for building private cloud infrastructure, especially for larger businesses, but the focus should be on making it as open as possible. If you can’t taste test an application or new platform environment in a matter of days or weeks, you’re doing something wrong. Openness also helps if you need to move your work, because you want to have as many destinations to choose from as you can.

Many providers under one roof.

But even among open ecosystems there are important differences to be aware of. Ideally you will find an open ecosystem with a large number of different network, cloud, software and hardware providers under one umbrella. This allows the customer to make decisions around adoption of new technology quickly and efficiently. So instead of providing access to one or two bandwidth providers, the ideal ecosystem provides access to big and small players, and can play them against each other to get the best price and services for customers. In reality bringing together the combined customer and supplier community creates greater opportunities for both sides, in effect, a win-win.

It shouldn’t stop with bandwidth, either. An ecosystem should have not only the option of different hardware, and support services, but also different cloud service providers. If a customer wants to get cloud computing from a vendor, the ecosystem provider should invite that provider in. And if someone wants to build their own cloud, the ecosystem provider and data center provider should have an array of choices available for a customer to choose from.

The ideal delivery platform for this ecosystem is a data center provider who can create an environment that supports the needs of enterprise computing, while also lowering the costs and barriers to entry for ecosystem partners. This is an environment that removes all your risks associated with disaster avoidance, regulatory concerns, capacity and security. That location should have access to national freeways and airports as well as local government support that will help facilitate worker relocation and education, while also providing considerations for your hardware taxation risks.

It’s tough to find one place where all the above are available to the customer, but they are out there. Having these resources readily available is like having a Home Depot and a Lowes move in next to your house the day before you start a big home project. No matter what tool or resource you need, it’s all right there, immediately available, with competition, quantity and variety.

In this environment building a business that requires IT – or rethinking your existing IT doesn’t seem so daunting: With all these resources available, you virtually eliminate the risk of being forced into a “pragmatic” (read: bad but necessary) decision. You are free to experiment once, twice, three times, and then put it into production, without most of the historical baggage like “high network costs”, “no skilled staff” or a data center that is “out of capacity,” which have traditionally driven IT decisions.

So the increasing complexity and speed at which IT is moving doesn’t have to be something to worry about, instead look at it as an opportunity to roll with the technological changes without becoming too invested in a closed ecosystem.

Mark Thiele is executive VP of Data Center Tech at Switch, the operator of the SuperNAP data center in Las Vegas. Thiele blogs at SwitchScribe and at Data Center Pulse, where is also president and founder. .He can be found on Twitter at @mthiele10.

Image courtesy of Flickr user john-norris.

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.

• Quality of the cloud: best practices for ISVs
• Migrating media applications to the private cloud: best practices for businesses
• Infrastructure Q1: IaaS Comes Down to Earth; Big Data Takes Flight

However, those longing for innovation in broadband here in the U.S. can hope that there are bigger plans in the works. With a fiber to the home network and gigabit Wi-Fi Google could take a cue from the recent launches in France and in the U.S. of mobile networks that lean heavily on Wi-Fi. Then Google could build a network that offers truly ubiquitous broadband within the confines of Palo Alto, Calif., and maybe later in Kansas City.

From the application to the FCC, which was spotted by Stephen Crowley,

Google Fiber seeks to test Bluetooth and Wi-Fi protocols and performance (including coordination of Wi-Fi channels between devices and in the presence of foreign signals) within an integrated access point as part of a fiber residential gateway. This line of testing will reveal real world engineering issues and reliability. The planned testing is not directed at evaluating the radio frequency characteristics of the equipment (which are known), but rather at the throughput and stability of the home networks that will support the equipment, as well as its basic functionality.

Right now, the current Wi-Fi technology (802.11n) tops out 600 Mbps, which means Wi-Fi becomes the bottleneck if you have a gigabit network coming into your home. 802.11ac’s multi-gigabit speeds would go a long way to opening up that pipe. But while chip companies have produced silicon for the next generation Wi-Fi standard, the standard itself isn’t ratified, nor are those chips in any real products that have passed through the FCC’s approval process. This application may be one of the first application for a commercial next-gen Wi-Fi device, although Google asked the FCC to keep many of the details confidential.

Of course, such powerful Wi-Fi and a fiber-to-the-home network opens up many more possibilities than mere super-fast home networking. Google could use its residential gateways and the fiber connection to blanket an entire town with incredibly fast Wi-Fi (and Bluetooth) networks. These technologies would give Google the tools to make broadband truly ubiquitous both inside and outside homes, which is a goal I’d love to see.

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.

• The future of Wi-Fi in the enterprise
• CES 2012: a recap and analysis
• NewNet 2012: companies and technologies set to disrupt

On the what is it category, it appears to be homebound, so it could perhaps be a set-top-box style device, or a new addendum to Google TV. Here’s what Google’s application, which was filed in December, offers in terms of information:

Google is developing an entertainment device that requires testing outside the laboratory environment. The device is in the prototyping phase and will be modified prior to final compliance testing. … Users will connect their device to home WiFi networks and use Bluetooth to connect to other home electronics equipment. This line of testing will reveal real world engineering issues and reliability of networks. The device utilizes a standard WiFi/Bluetooth module, and the planned testing is not directed at evaluating the radio frequency characteristics of the module (which are known), but rather at the throughput and stability of the home WiFi networks that will support the device, as well as the basic functionality of the device. From this testing we hope to modify the design in order to maximize product robustness and user experience. Utilizing the requested number of units will allow testing of real world network performance and its impact on applications running on the device, so that any problems can be discovered and addressed promptly. (emphasis mine)

Google asked to test 252 devices between January 17 through July 17 in Mountain View,Calif.; New York, Cambridge, Mass. and Los Angeles. Its employees will have them, so maybe you can hit a Google employee’s home to watch the Super Bowl and then start sniffing around.

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.

• CES 2012: a recap and analysis
• Q4 Wrap-up: SOPA and the future of digital content
• Connected Consumer 2012: A year of consolidation and integration

U.S. Senator Al Franken finds the deal "troubling."

Congress is eyeing the competitive implications of Verizon’s $4 billion deals to buy spectrum from the cable companies, hoping to understand how the deals could affect both wireless and wireline markets. Much like those of us at GigaOM, some in the Senate are wondering if this is a cease-fire in terms of broadband competition, both in the air and on the ground.

Under a pessimistic view the deal could lead to consumers’ getting stuck 5 or 10 years out with slower broadband than the rest of the world, with no competitive impetus to move the U.S. forward. On the wireless side, it potentially eliminates the threat or the existence of a new player that could lower prices and keep Verizon and AT&T “honest.” That’s why Congress, the FCC and perhaps the Department of Justice should ask a lot of questions about this deal and its attendant marketing agreements between the cable companies and Verizon.

While they are at it, regulators and legislators should also ask a few more things, such as why the cable companies announced their deal with Verizon a mere three days after AT&T withdrew its petition to approve its T-Mobile deal from the FCC. Knowing the deal was unlikely to go through and that AT&T would soon be in the market to replace the spectrum it couldn’t get from T-Mobile, why wouldn’t the cable companies hold off, knowing they could then pit AT&T’s and Verizon’s bids against each other?

Was it likely that AT&T, which was willing to spend $39 billion on T-Mobile, would walk away from SpectrumCo without even matching Verizon’s $3.6 billion bid for Comcast, Time Warner Cable and Bright House Networks’ airwaves, and its later $315 million bid for Cox’s licenses? Recall that around this time, analysts expected AT&T to pay a 77 percent premium for Dish on speculation that AT&T was out for its spectrum. At that premium Dish would be worth almost $23 billion.

Conspiracy or the future?

The day the deal was announced, I laid out why Verizon may have done this deal and why Congress and the FCC should pay attention. In selling off their airwaves in exchange for some secret marketing agreements, the cable guys may have gotten Verizon off their backs in terms of its fiber-to-the-home deployments, leaving cable as the fastest broadband around in areas that don’t have FiOS.

In a pessimistic view, this means that the cable guys would no longer face competition nor a reason to keep pushing their wireline infrastructure. Today that’s not so bad, since most cable companies have deployed the faster DOCSIS 3.0 technology that can deliver up to 100 Mbps down to homes, but it is depressing to consider that five years from now we may still have that same infrastructure and little opportunity to go forward, unless the cable companies want to invest in fiber to the home. And without Verizon or AT&T pushing them forward, why would they? It’s worth noting that Verizon’s FiOS plans helped jump-start the deployment of DOCSIS 3.0 services in areas where Verizon laid fiber.

What about wireless?

Comcast is already bundling Verizon’s wireless services to its customers, as my colleague Kevin Fitchard pointed out on Wednesday, pushing ahead with the marketing deal even though the actual spectrum transfer and deal have yet to be approved. But in taking out the cable companies, Verizon may have just killed the best chance of a competitive wireless operator. Comcast laid out in gory detail why it ultimately decided not to deploy a wireless network with its spectrum, but given the cable consortium’s spectrum holdings, cable’s burgeoning commitment to Wi-Fi and the fact that many Americans have a cable set-top box in their homes, Comcast and the cable guys were the U.S.’ best chance of getting an alternative type of mobile network and creating some real competition in wireless.

For example, this month Free, a French broadband provider, announced a mobile service that relies on its existing set-top boxes in the homes of its broadband customers to provide a Wi-Fi network in urban areas. The phone service uses 3G and Wi-Fi and by doing so can offer mobile data for about $25 a month. Providers in France are already dropping their prices in response to the new offering. But in the U.S. the cable guys decided to pass up their chance to play in wireless. Now all the focus will be on Republic Wireless, which is also using Wi-Fi (and Sprint’s 3G network) to deliver calls, although without the benefit of having a Wi-Fi-enabled set-top box already in the home.

Cable’s capitulation on wireless might be good news for Republics and even for AT&T and Verizon, although they are not likely to be as threatened by a cable-wireless offering as the smaller providers. But in selling its airwaves to Verizon in exchange for the chance to resell the carrier’s wireless service (and, heck, even FiOS in areas where Verizon has deployed fiber to the home), cable sold out its wireless ambitions and as a result sold out consumers.

And Verizon? Well, Verizon scored a lot of new spectrum at a fraction of the capital and political cost that AT&T expended trying to do the same thing. Verizon has hurt its direct competition in addition to possibly hurting wireline and wireless competition. Now that’s genius.

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.

• Want to watch TV? There’s an app for that
• Report: Monetizing Digital Content
• Q4 Wrap-up: SOPA and the future of digital content

Programmable networks could mean less downtime.

HP is following other big systems makers into the world of software defined networking with a line of 16 OpenFlow-enabled switches. That’s a pretty serious commitment to OpenFlow, a protocol that helps take the intelligence associated with routing packets off of the high-priced switching gear and puts it on commodity servers.

HP not only introduced OpenFlow enabled switches, but said that customers with existing HP switches can download software that will add OpenFlow capabilities to their current gear. This looks like a far bigger committment than IBM’s and NEC’s effort to build out a hardware and services package around OpenFlow and software defined networking from earlier this month, and is a continuation of the trend toward OpenFlow making it into production environments this year.

OpenFlow and software defined networking has been a topic for academics, webscale vendors and carriers, as they seek to do to routers and switches what virtualization did for servers — make them more agile and scalable. OpenFlow is just one tool to build SDNs while Juniper, Cisco and other vendors also offer tools for network virtualization. Of course, most vendors say they will support the OpenFlow protocol as well, including Cisco, the vendor that stands to be hurt the most if OpenFlow ushers in an age of folks buying cheap switches and shifting the networking intelligence to commodity servers.

As we add more devices to the network they have to scale out better, and as IT relies more on on-demand compute and storage, the networking has to become as flexible as the virtualized servers that spin up and down. The network becomes a bottleneck if every time you want to add capacity to your cloud or associate new networking policies with a series of virtual machines, someone has to manually unplug boxes or install new load balancing or firewall gear. Virtualization and software defined networks are seen as the solution.

HP said that so far it has more than 10 million OpenFlow-capable switch ports deployed, which is tiny number compared to the overall switch market. However, it’s not alone in pushing OpenFlow, and it has made quite a commitment with a full upgrade of its existing switches and 16 new ones on offer.

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.

• Migrating media applications to the private cloud: best practices for businesses
• Infrastructure Q2: Big data and PaaS gain more momentum
• Report: How Mobile Cloud Computing Will Change Tech

To outline what still needs to be done, and give governments a framework for understanding how 50 billion devices could be connected in the next 8 years, the OECD has released a report laying out the needs of an M2M network and the tradeoffs associated wtih different technologies. It offers a few interesting use cases, as well, although the focus is more squarely on the practicalities of making it work. As usual, it starts with the networks.

The networks

The OECD breaks down the needs depending on the type of device and its function, basically if a device moves or not, and then how far it moves. For highly mobile devices that travel around the world, we’re actually short on options, but cellular is probably the best bet. For stationary devices in the home, power line communications or Wi-Fi could offer compelling options. However, with each technology there are tradeoffs, and those tradeoffs become magnified if you’re considering connections for products designed to be used globally.

For example, cellular technology has drawbacks because 2G networks, which are fairly ubiquitous are also being phased out, and the lifetime of a connected device may stretch for decades (think of how long you keep your fridge or a bike. However 3G networks aren’t going to arrive everywhere, which means some places might then never have a connection. Imagine if you had a pet tracking service for Fido that used 3G and Fido wandered out of a coverage zone. LTE and 4G might seem like a good solution for offering the longest time until obsolescence, but right now radios suck power and networks are thin on the ground.

Each wireline and wireless network technology offers drawbacks of this nature plus those associated with costs, reliability and security. It’s enough to make one’s head spin, or to at least hope that someone might combine a variety of services under one roof and just offer connectivity packages.

The role of wholesalers.

It’s not that companies don’t want to take on the role of aggregating connectivity for customers, but that the wholesale market for access has a few roadblocks, according to the report. One roadblock is how devices will be identified on M2M networks. From IP addresses to individual mobile subscriber numbers, there are a variety of ways to authenticate devices on a network. But not all methods of identification are available to everyone.

In some cases the government will only allow telecom providers to offer identifying numbers, which means only they can provide service for M2M communications. The OECD believes that will keep prices high and limit the market. That brings us to the role governments will have to play in the creation of a viable system. From the report:

Access to a unique and verifiable identity is another important requirement for many M2M applications. The model provided by SIM-cards seems to offer a great deal of flexibility and possibilities. There are other ways of providing a secure identity, but using a SIM-card chip soldered onto a motherboard or integrated into a chipset appears to be a very cost-effective method of providing security. As regulators play an important role in assigning SIM-card numbers (so called ESN-numbers) they will have to take this role into account in terms of the future of M2M.

The role of regulation

In asking governments to rethink their regulatory environment for a new age of communications built on IP networks and between people, machines and back-end computers processing data, the report hits on an increasingly common problem of the Internet age. Ironically, a decade or so after IP communications became widespread in the U.S. we are only now getting to a place in our regulatory regime where the government is discussing how this changes the way laws should be written and enforced. Legislation and regulation lagging the marketplace isn’t new, but the OECD report makes a good first step in understanding one of the next regulatory battles looming on the horizon.

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.

• The future of Wi-Fi in the enterprise
• Connected world: the consumer technology revolution
• NewNet Q4: Platform mania and social commerce shakeout