The final approval is largely a formality, since Weightless SIG members such as Neul, CSR, Cable & Wireless, ARM and Google have already begun working with the technology. Neul has developed its first commercial Weightless chip, and has launched an experimental smart grid network in Cambridge. Google has begun using the technology in broadband trials in South Africa.

But the approval does cement the standard, allowing the SIG’s membership to begin developing products without worrying about technical specs shifting from under them. As defined, version 1.0 of the standard is pretty flexible, allowing it to be used for any kind of machine-to-machine (M2M) communications network, whether it aggregates tiny transmissions from millions of nodes, such as in a smart grid, or utilizes a more traditional high-speed mobile data connection.

The SIG is also making some pretty astonishing claims about the technology’s capabilities: a range of up to 10 km (6.2 miles), allowing for far-flung networks; device battery life for up 10 years, which means monitoring devices could be deployed in the field for long periods of time without maintenance; and chipset costs of less $2, making the barrier of entry for including Weightless in a device extremely low.

Those three specs make up the holy trinity of wide-area M2M communications and would make the technology feasible for all but the cheapest devices in the future internet of things. But it remains to be seen whether Weightless can live up to those promises.

White spaces broadband in the U.K. is taking a different shape than in the U.S. On this side of the Atlantic, white spaces are viewed more as unlicensed broadband wireless technology — sometimes dubbed “Super Wi-Fi”. White spaces are the unused frequencies between TV transmissions, and since the TV airwaves are much more crowded in urban areas, white spaces likely will be most useful for rural broadband in the U.S.

Feature image courtesy of Cillian Storm.

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This week Broadcom unveiled its first LTE chipset for mobile devices, but it wasn’t just any LTE chip, it was an LTE-Advanced chip. Sprint and T-Mobile were late to the LTE party, but that’s okay. They aren’t building any old LTE networks. They’re building LTE-Advanced networks.

Everywhere you look, some infrastructure vendor is bragging about its LTE-Advanced base station or some carrier is talking up its LTE-Advanced-capable network. With these claims, it’s hard to imagine that just two years ago plain-Jane LTE was on the cutting edge of mobile technology.

It’s all hogwash.

There are no true LTE-Advanced networks, chips or devices in the market today and there won’t be for many years. The mobile industry is playing an old game: technology inflation.

You may remember that a few years back T-Mobile and AT&T magically transformed their HSPA networks from 3G systems into 4G systems by waving their marketing wands. That technology inflation, however, began years began years before when Sprint first attached the 4G moniker to its WiMAX networks.

Even today, mobile technology purists would argue the world has yet to see its first 4G network, since no carrier system yet meets the original 4G guidelines established by the International Telecommunication Union. Instead of condemning the industry’s fast-and-loose play with the term, the ITU simply caved, retroactively defining 4G as pretty much anything the carriers wanted it to be. 4G has always been an iffy term, but after the ITU dropped the ball it became a meaningless one.

Now the same thing is happening with LTE. In an effort to seem more progressive than their competitors, carriers, infrastructure vendors and chipset makers are finding loopholes in the technical standards to elevate their LTE technologies to the rarified status of LTE-Advanced. Basically, the industry is carrying around a Cadillac keychain but it’s really driving a Buick.

For a more detailed explanation of what LTE-Advanced actually is, you can check out these posts from Stacey Higginbotham and me about the technology’s nuts and bolts (If you’re a GigaOM Pro subscriber there’s also this more in-depth piece). Here’s the general twist: LTE is an iterative technology much like 3G HSPA before it. Just as the industry started out with slower UMTS networks and migrated to faster HSPA and HSPA+ systems, LTE will go through the same evolution process over the next decade or so.

Nokia Siemens Networks’ conception of a heterogeneous network

With each new step on that evolutionary path, downlink and uplink speeds will get faster and more resilient, latency levels will drop and overall network capacity will balloon. At some point we’ll follow that path into a set of technologies and techniques that the mobile standards bodies have defined as LTE-Advanced.

We’ll start seeing big changes in how cellular networks and devices are designed. Infrastructure and handset makers will start bolting multiple pairs of antennas onto their towers and devices. Carriers will be able to bond disparate bands of spectrum together to create super-connections. Small cells and Wi-Fi access points will merge into the fabric of our big umbrella cellular grids creating the heterogeneous network. But we’re nowhere near that point today.

The devil is in the technical specs

It’s important to note that LTE-Advanced isn’t a monolithic technology, it’s really a collection of technologies. You can think of LTE-Advanced as a menu, from which carriers will order from depending on their needs. Some will order up the improved air interfaces, while others will munch on multiple antenna or advanced interference mitigation techniques — many operators will do all of the above.

One operator’s LTE-Advanced is going to look very different from another operator’s LTE-Advanced, but there are some minimum guidelines. One of those guidelines is the amount of capacity the network will support over a single 20 MHz swathe, or “carrier,” of spectrum. According to the standards group that defines these things — the 3GPP — at the very least an LTE-Advanced carrier should deliver more than 300 Mbps of downlink capacity or more than 50 Mbps of uplink capacity.

I’m going to pick on Broadcom for a minute, only because it happens to be the most recent offender. In its materials, Broadcom clearly states its super-chip supports 150 Mbps on the downlink and 50 Mbps on the uplink. Impressive, yes, but it’s not LTE-Advanced. What Broadcom has built is known in industry parlance as an LTE user equipment category 4 chip. LTE-Advanced doesn’t start until category 6. This is fairly technical, but take a look at this chart of user equipment categories compiled by Wikipedia editors (A quick reference guide: Release 8 is LTE and Release 10 is LTE-Advanced):

Broadcom is only halfway to even the minimum definition of LTE-Advanced’s speed specs of 300 Mbps. The same goes for Qualcomm and any other LTE chip vendor. In fact, today’s networks are right smack in the middle of the regular LTE standard (maxing out at 100-150 Mbps on the downlink), and they’re probably going to remain that way for some time.

So how is everyone getting away with calling their products LTE-Advanced? Why, through marketing of course. They’ve latched onto a single spec in the LTE-Advanced standards, a technique called carrier aggregation. Carrier aggregation is the super-connection technology I mentioned earlier, and in truth it’s older than the hills. T-Mobile and many other global carriers already use it in their networks to support their 42 Mbps services.

By boasting technical support for carrier aggregation on LTE networks, marketers have made the huge leap to LTE-Advanced, which is ridiculously misleading. It’s the equivalent of ordering a Coke and then claiming you’ve indulged in a full meal.

We’re going to get to LTE-Advanced eventually, and those networks will be truly awesome. But the industry isn’t doing itself any favors by promising us technology it can never deliver. It’s 4G’s overhype all over again, and it needs to stop.

Feature image courtesy of Shutterstock user B & T Media Group Inc.

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WiGig is an extremely high-speed, but short range, local networking technology that promises to link ultra-high-performance broadband appliances and peripherals with up to 6 gigabit per second connections. Its major limitation is the extremely high 60 GHz frequencies it uses, which limits its connections to near-line-of-sight within a single room. Still the technology has attracted a lot of interest from networking vendors from giants Intel, Dell and Broadcom to a spate of new startups like Wilocity and Nitero.

Wi-Fi Alliance marketing director Kelly Davis-Felner said the respective alliances have been collaborating for some time and as it became apparent that most device makers would integrate both Wi-Fi and WiGig technologies into their future products, it made sense for the two entities to merge.

“The technology behind WiGig is fairly different from Wi-Fi in terms of performance, range, and use cases, and doesn’t interoperate with traditional Wi-Fi,” Davis-Felner said via e-mail. “As such, we expect that the branding for the technology will be different from “Wi-Fi”.  That said, it’s important to note that many, if not most, implementations of 60 GHz technology will likely coexist alongside traditional Wi-Fi technology.”

WiGig will coexist with the Wi-Fi Alliance’s own gigabit wireless networking initiative, 802.11ac, which will work in the 5 GHz  airwaves, but it now looks like WiGig will get fully subsumed into the Alliance’s own work in the 60 GHz, based on the developing IEEE 802.11ad standard (subscription required).

Davis-Felner said the Alliance will begin its lab interoperability work this month, and it plans to begin ramping its certification program by the end of the year. WiGig isn’t the only group seeking to use the 60 GHz airwaves. Late last year Silicon Image announced plans to use the same spectrum to deliver video and gaming from handsets to televisions and other large screens inside the home using the Wireless HD standard.

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Lord Justice Leveson, who has been hearing issues including the “hacking” of mobile phones for news stories, said the existing Press Complaints Commission (PCC), comprised of newspaper editors, is “not actually a regulator at all”. And he has rejected news publishers’ alternative suggestion of binding themselves to ethical standards by commercial contracts.

Instead, he is advising the government to legislate the creation of a new independent body to promote “high standards” and safeguard individuals’ rights, run by a chair and a board who will hold publishers to a code.

Leveson is leaving the definition of that code and the implementation of the new body to whomever Prime Minister David Cameron, should he follow the recommendation, might appoint to set them up. But Leveson suggests the code should outline what constitutes “public interest” – a thorny topic on which newspapers and others often disagree.

The Lord Justice says publishers will be incentivised to adhere to this code because it will create an alternative dispute arbitration forum that will be cheaper than court battles — if publishers lost against a complainant in court, they would face heftier damages awards than in arbitration.

Whether this is enough of an incentive if unclear — after all, news publishers have operated in what Leveson called a “reckless” manner with the threat of hefty court fines up until this point.

Newspaper industry campaigners had worried that Leveson’s report, if it required legislation, would amount to state interference in newsgathering. They had highlighted United States citizens’ right to free speech under their First Amendment. But Leveson says:

“This is not, and cannot be characterised as, statutory regulation of the press. The legislation would not establish a body to regulate the press: it would be up to the press to come forward with their own body that meets the criteria laid down.

“The legislation would not give any rights to Parliament, to the Government, or to any regulatory (or other) body to prevent newspapers from publishing any material whatsoever.

“Nor would it give any rights to these entities to require newspapers to publish any material except insofar as it would require the recognised self-regulatory body to have the power to direct the placement and prominence of corrections and apologies in respect of information found, by that body, to require them.”

That definition of the body’s role sounds somewhat akin to that of the existing Press Complaints Commission, which is now discredited. But Leveson also says: “(The legislation) would enshrine, for the first time, a legal duty on the Government to protect the freedom of the press.”

But the new body must be recognised by Ofcom, the existing and powerful regulator of UK radio spectrum, telecommunications infrastructure and broadcasting standards — and Leveson suggests Ofcom be used as a “backstop” regulator for publishers that refuse to join the new scheme.

Leveson said: “For the seventh time in less than 70 years, there is a new report commissioned by the government dealing with concerns about the press. The PCC has failed in the task — if, indeed, it ever saw itself as having such a task — of keeping the press to its responsibilities to the public. There must be change.”

In sum, the Leveson Inquiry report amounts to a stern telling off for British newspapers, sets the basic colour and ideas for a slightly enhanced regulatory body but leaves all of the next steps to government — a process that is likely to be mired in ongoing political wrangling.

Update: Prime Minister David Cameron says he agrees with much of the recommendations but not the need to create the new body through state legislation:

“For the first time, we would have crossed the rubicon of writing elements of press regulation into the law of the land.

“We should, I believe, be wary of any legislation that has the potential to infringe free speech and a free press.

“In this House – which has been a bulwark of democracy for centuries – we should think very, very carefully before crossing this line.”

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According to Ericsson, Samsung entered into a licensing agreement with Ericsson in 2001 for the latter’s 30,000 patents relating to technologies ranging from Wi-Fi to GSM and LTE. They renewed the agreement in 2007, but after failing to reach a third renewal agreement following two years of negotiations, Samsung let the deal expire, Ericsson chief intellectual property officer Kasim Alfalahi said in a phone interview.

Alfalahi said that Ericsson has more than 100 cross-licensing deals with vendors across the industry, all with similar terms it has offered Samsung. Ericsson’s suit, filed today in a U.S. district court in Texas, is demanding THAT Samsung pay licensing fees in arrears and damages for willfully infringing its patents. If Samsung refuses to accept new a cross-licensing agreement, Ericsson wants an injunction against Samsung selling any equipment based on its patents, Alfalahi said.

These kind of licensing dust-ups are part and parcel for the telecom industry, which relies heavily on standards to build global networks. Though no single company controls the standard itself, they do own patents to the individual technologies and techniques that make up the standard. Consequently no vendor can build a phone or design a network without using the intellectual property of multiple competitors.

To prevent a single patent holder or group of holders from mucking up the standard, vendors are supposed to cross-license their intellectual property under Fair, Reasonable And Non-Discriminatory (FRAND) terms. Obviously how FRAND is quantified can vary considerably depending on how each company values its own patents. The result has been a lot of blood spilled over licensing fees, as evidenced by the epic battles between Qualcomm and Broadcom in the last decade. The nastiness of those patent wars have led companies like Apple and Google to buy up the patent portfolios of faded wireless giants like Motorola and Nortel in order to bulwark their intellectual property defenses.

“Our patents give us a right to exclude others, but with open standards we have all committed to license openly,” Alfalahi said. “We feel confident that we have given Samsung an offer we feel is FRAND. We feel any judge is going to see our offer as FRAND.”

Samsung’s fight with Ericsson is different from its battle with Apple because instead of focusing on handset design it revolves around core wireless technologies; in particular, infrastructure, a field in which Samsung was a minor player for most of its history. Samsung, however, has been asserting itself in the networking space in recent years, breaking into both the U.S. and European markets with huge contracts from Sprint and 3 UK. Not only are North America and Europe traditionally Ericsson turf, but Samsung’s recent success means the stakes are higher for both companies. The more equipment Samsung sells, the more of its revenue it has to pay out to its licensors. And Samsung has some big ambitions. It recently made the rather audacious claim it will become the No. 3 infrastructure vendor in the world.

We’ve only heard from Ericsson on this spat, though we’ve reached out to Samsung for comment and will update this post when we hear back. The disagreement is likely much less one-sided than Ericsson makes it appear since these deals are never one-way licensing agreements. Samsung is still a major player in the wireless world and has a huge patent portfolio of its own. That means Ericsson has to license Samsung’s intellectual property as well. Expect to see a counter-suit soon.

Featured image courtesy of Flickr user opensourceway; Gavel image courtesy of Shutterstock user zimmytws.

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The Internet of things is supposed to connect every aspect of our lives from our homes and cars to the objects we wear and the goods we consume. It’s even connecting ice machines. But one thing the Internet of things lacks is a unifying standard.

Devices will be connected by different radio technologies: Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, ZigBee and a host of 2G and mobile broadband cellular technologies. There’s really no way of assuring your “thing” will connect to the network or networks available at any given time.

The mobile industry is trying to rectify the problem, at least as it pertains to cellular machine-to-machine (M2M) technologies. The bigger issue of fragmentation among bands and technologies isn’t going to get worked out anytime soon: You’re not going to connect a GSM wristwatch to a CDMA or Wi-Fi network. But often you can’t connect that GSM wristwatch to a GSM network either. Roaming among networks that use the same technology requires not only a business arrangement with each carrier but also a common protocol.

A group of global wireless-standards bodies are trying to tackle that problem. The European Telecommunications Standards Institute (ETSI), the Telecommunications Industry Association (TIA) and the Alliance for Telecommunications Industry Solutions (ATIS) in the U.S. are working with their counterparts in Japan, Korea and China to develop a common “service layer” that can be embedded in every M2M device, making them compatible with M2M application servers hosted by any global operator.

At the end of the day, that means many of the devices in our Internet of things suddenly become untethered from specific networks. That wristwatch could work on AT&T as well as T-Mobile’s GSM network and then connect to Rogers Communications’ GSM towers when you fly into Toronto. Shipping containers embedded with M2M modules connect to whatever network is available at any port of call. The same wireless smart meter could be deployed in Kansas City or in Marrakesh without having to completely reconfigure its software.

Many things, many internets

Roaming among networks is possible today. The problem is those arrangements tend to be ad hoc deals put together by M2M service aggregators like Kore Telematics, which sort out all the underlying carrier deals and manage each network’s various protocols. Some operators have started taking matters into their own hands.

On Tuesday seven major operators — KPN, NTT DoCoMo, Rogers, SingTel, Telefónica, Telstra and Vimpelcom — formed an alliance to create a common M2M management platform allowing for the “delivery of a global product with a single SIM, eliminating roaming costs in the countries of participating operators.”

It sounds like a standard, but it’s not quite the same thing. All seven providers use the same M2M management platform supplied by Jasper Wireless, so they are able to bridge their difference through a common vendor. Still, the effort is admirable and could lead the creation of ad hoc interoperability among a large section of the world’s carriers. Jasper has many other customers besides those seven, including AT&T and America Movil.

A good example of a problem such cooperation could solve is the Kindle’s international predicament. Even though Amazon sells the Kindle all over the world it has one “home” network, AT&T. That means any Kindle user either living in or traveling to another country has to pay international download (read: roaming) fees to buy a new book or access a periodical subscription.

It’s fairly ridiculous that a multinational retailer like Amazon can’t support its flagship device internationally without resorting to such single-carrier arrangements. But if Amazon were to broker a deal with this new alliance, the Kindle would find itself at home on whichever of these seven networks it wandered onto.

There’s a possibility the industry will coalesce around a single proprietary technology such as Jasper’s, creating an ad hoc standard much like we see developing in the public-cloud space around Amazon Web Services. But an ad hoc standard isn’t a standard.

What we need is for the industry to get together and sort out a way to make every M2M device carrier and network agnostic. A gadget maker should be able to build a device that connects to the Internet of things without a specific carrier, a specific management platform or a specific application server in mind. The business deals with individual carriers would still need to be sorted out, but first we need remove the technology barriers. Otherwise we won’t wind up with a single Internet of things but instead many internets, each with its own separate sets of things.

Feature image courtesy of Shutterstock user alexmillos; Standard photo courtesy of Shutterstock user almagami

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The European Telecommunications Standards Institute, ETSI, was due to vote on Friday over which standard to adopt for the nano-SIM card — the smaller, next generation chip that is likely to become the norm in mobiles over the coming years.

Adopting an even smaller card will allow manufacturers to make thinner handsets, store different sorts of information or use the space for larger batteries or other technology — and at a meeting this week ETSI’s members were faced with a choice between two competing ideas — one backed by Apple, and the other supported by Nokia and RIM.

Both sides had been lobbying hard to get their standard adopted: Apple suggested that it would offer the technology royalty free to carriers, but Nokia responded angrily by saying it would not license its applicable patents if that happened.

It quickly became a vicious battle, with control over the future of mobile at stake — particularly given that Apple is thought to be considering embeddable SIM cards that would eventually allow it to sidestep carriers and other parts of the mobile industry.

In the end, the clash appears to have been too hot for ETSI to handle, as the organization eventually decided that it was better to postpone the vote since there was a clear failure to reach an accord. ETSI rules suggest it will be at least 30 days until a vote can be held — so expect to see both sides going at each other over the next month as they try to politick their way to success.

Comparison of SIM card sizes by Giesecke & Devrient

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By releasing eight use cases that describe the components required in various enterprise cloud deployments, the alliance aims to make it easier to compare and contrast commercial solutions and increase the level of technical interoperability between clouds. Its hope is that data and services can move from one cloud provider to another with minimal difficulty, and the alliance is calling upon its members to proactively adopt these use cases in their internal planning and procurement processes.

The alliance suggests that support for its work will generate billions in new business for the cloud computing industry and will save as much as $25 billion in customers’ deployment costs. Industry players such as EMC and Hitachi Data Systems are listed in the lowest tier of involvement as “adopter members,” though major cloud providers such as Amazon and Rackspace do not appear to have been involved in drafting or commenting upon these documents.

By seeking to describe mainstream use cases, the alliance has taken a potentially valid approach to harmonizing the cloud computing market. However, many of these use cases remain weak and lacking in detail. The Regulatory Framework activity, for example, is currently little more than a list of regulators, and it’s a long way from being a viable use case that a vendor or buyer could use to make decisions. And while there’s no denying that such attempts at standardization are a positive thing, as they help both buyers and sellers of cloud services, having too many “standards” runs the risk of having no standard at all.

To combat this, the alliance should concentrate on enriching its use cases and then submitting them to the standards bodies and regulators already active in this space. These use cases have the potential to be a valuable addition to those activities. But they lack the detail to justifiably be used as sticks with which to beat “noncompliant” vendors.

For more on the alliance’s new use cases and their implications for the industry, see my latest Weekly Update for GigaOM Pro (subscription required).

Image courtesy of flickr user hwat

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It’s been clear for years now that a shortage of available Internet addresses was bound to occur under the current IPv4 protocol. And in February, the IP address distribution organization ICANN announced that the 4.2 billion addresses available under the IPv4 protocol had all been taken up. IPv6 supports a much higher number of addresses — 340 undecillion, to be exact– so the transition from IPv4 to IPv6 is largely understood to be a difficult but necessary step for the long-term maintenance of the world wide web.

With all the coverage of the IP address shortage issue — we’ve been covering the topic for years — it’s a bit hard to believe that the time has come for a large-scale test of the new protocol. Google, Yahoo, Facebook and several Internet networking companies are all taking part in World IPv6 Day and will offer their content over IPv6 for a test run of the protocol.

So what will World IPv6 Day mean for the average Internet user? Not much, according to Facebook network engineer Donn Lee. “We anticipate that 99.97% of users will not be affected at all,” Lee wrote in a company blog post about Facebook’s participation in World IPv6 Day. “The small number of users who may be affected may find that pages are slow to load and we are working to minimize the impact.”

Google, which plans to deliver virtually all of its services including Search, Gmail and YouTube over IPv6 for the entirety of the 24-hour test, expects a similarly low impact for the end user. “In all likelihood, you won’t even notice the test,” Google network engineer Lorenzo Colitti wrote in a company blog post. “The vast majority (99.95 percent) of people will be able to access services without interruption: either they’ll connect over IPv6, or their systems will successfully fall back to IPv4.”

That still leaves a potential .05 percent of end users who could experience failures. According to Colitti, failures will most likely be “slow or unresponsive” experiences on participating websites such as Google, Facebook, Yahoo or Bing. People can test how well their computer is expected to handle IPv6 through Google’s IPv6 test or at the independently run website Test-ipv6.com.

Are you undergoing any preparations for IPv6 Day? How do you expect the big transition to pan out? Let us know in the comments.

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Simon: Can you briefly outline Opera’s stance on open standards?

Lawson: Of all the browsers currently available, Opera has been around the longest, and has always supported open standards. Note I don’t mean open source; although there are overlaps between the two movements, they’re not the same. You could make an open-source Photoshop clone, for example, but as the Photoshop data format PSD isn’t an open standard, so you couldn’t use it in your clone. We believe that if data is transferred in open, royalty-free formats then it is more future-proof and more manipulable than data that is held in proprietary formats. You’re also protected against being locked into one company’s products — if you don’t like us tomorrow, you can change. I have university essays in a proprietary Tasword format that I can’t open any more as the format was tied to one program, which is now discontinued.

And we put our money where our mouth is: Out of 600 employees, about 25 devote most of their time working on actually making the standards — both the “sexy” standards like HTML5, CSS (our CTO Håkon Wium Lie was co-creator of CSS), SVG, geolocation and widgets, and also the “industry standards” that drive the TV and mobile applications industry, such as CE-HTML, JIL and BONDI.

Simon: The web designers and developers in the WebWorkerDaily audience should all be aware of the benefits of open standards as they use them daily in their work, but why are they important for everyone else? If I’m, say, a copywriter or a lawyer, why should I care?

Lawson: Apart from the future-proofing aspect I explained before, you also have the advantage of portability. An HTML document, for example, will open just about anywhere — PC, Mac, Linux, mobile devices, netbooks etc. Documents authored to W3C standards can work with all the world’s languages, and can be run on mobile devices, TVs and even the much-vaunted web-enabled fridge. There’s also the question of accessibility. Open web standards developed by the W3C have to go through a process to ensure they are accessible — that is, the information contained in documents developed according to the standard can be made available to people with disabilities so, for example, a blind person can hear a description of an image, or a person who can’t use a mouse can navigate a web page using only the keyboard. That accessibility isn’t automatic — the developer has to be professional and take care to use the language correctly — but there is nothing inherently blocking that accessibility. It seems to me that a copywriter would want her purple prose to be available to as many people as possible, and the lawyer would know that in many jurisdictions it’s illegal to discriminate against people with disabilities.

Simon: Opera has been championing support for standards for some time now. Was the decision to support open standards primarily an ideological one, or a commercial one?

Lawson: Both. Our customers (for our embedded browsers, our mobile browsers, etc.) require us to adhere to industry standards, so if we don’t then we don’t get the business. Open standards, as I explained before, ensure the widest possible reach, so it’s sensible to champion them and support them.

Fundamentally (and here’s the ideology) we believe that you should be able to reach any website from any device: a desktop, a phone, an in-car browser, a digital picture frame. It won’t necessarily look exactly the same everywhere (in fact, it shouldn’t — a web page might be easier to read if reformatted to fit a mobile phone screen, for example), but you should be able to access it and interact with it.

Simon: It seems to me that open standards take a long time to develop, due to the amount of wrangling it takes to get agreement from all interested parties in reaching the most acceptable solution. Do you think that open standards hinder or slow the pace of browser innovation (and the web, generally)?

Lawson: It does take a long time to develop open standards. But that standardization process pays off very quickly. Developing a typical web page now is much quicker if you do it to those standards than it was during the dark days of the last Browser War, when you had to develop parallel code bases for IE and Netscape, or choose one of them and lock out people who used the other browser.

As to whether open standards slow the development of the browser — that could be true, if we were selfish. If, for example, you wanted to include some new feature in a browser it is indeed much faster just to develop it and add it in, rather than wait for it to be standardized. But that definitely inhibits the development of the open, interoperable web, and for us that’s much, much more important.

In fact, open standards can speed up browser development. Take, for example, XMLHttpRequest — XHR — the technology that powers Ajax-driven websites that feel as responsive as desktop apps. It was invented by Microsoft. Every other browser vendor saw the value of this technology and spent countless man-hours reverse engineering it to get into their browsers. Now, XHR has been standardized. Any new browser vendor wishing to implement XHR just picks up the spec and implements it, with no need for all that reverse engineering. And because the specification is well-written (disclosure: it was edited by Anne van Kesteren, a colleague of mine at Opera) it can be implemented in a way that is interoperable with existing browsers and websites. Everybody wins.

Simon: There’s new browser war raging at the moment — the major vendors all have pretty good products. Competition in the market is fierce, and seems to be being waged on three fronts: features, speed and standards. What future developments are you looking forward to the most?

Lawson: Personally, I’m excited about HTML5 (so excited, in fact, I’m writing a book about it). HTML is the language that the web
is based on, and it hasn’t been overhauled in a decade. The new version — which already has great support in modern browsers — allows websites to
be even more like desktop applications, encompassing on-the-fly image generation, native video and audio, data storage in the browser and offline applications. Consumers might not know there’s a whole new evolution under the hood, but they will notice new robustness, interoperability and things “just working” — no more messages to download and install new plugins.

Widgets are very exciting, too. You can write an app that behaves like a native app, has access to the file system but is written using web standards, so
can be run on any smartphone with a widget manager (see more at widgets.opera.com)

What browser developments are you looking forward to the most?

Related GigaOM Pro content (sub. req.): What Does the Future Hold For Browsers?

Photo by stock.xchng user beuford00