A.N.D.Je.-L.

TeleManaging the World from the Riviera

This is end May and the yearly gathering of the creme de la creme of the happy few engineers who understand how to manage networks so that anybody can make any money out of it. Fifteen years ago I remember my first exposure to what was at that time called the TMN. Since then there has been TOM, eTOM, SID, TAM, NGOSS, TNA and more. Well, nowadays any guy startind a Service Provider business from his kitchen can honestly be blamed if he cannot set up his state-of-the-art OSS and BSS in less than a week and hundred rupees (if he goes for Wipro). So what are the gurus still teaching ? Filling in some gaps, comparing eTOM with ITIL and soon with MP3, why not. Well, guys, it's Nice, there are plenty of yachts in the nearby harbour, Corsica is 2h30mn with the ferry (no strike today), it's the Film Festival in Cannes 20 minutes drive from here, why don't we all celebrate this mature industry by drowning into liters of Champagne devant la Baie des Anges ?

Après les bits, les qubits

Le 13 Février dernier la société Canadienne D-WAVE a présenté le premier prototype de son ordinateur quantique, des années en avance des prédictions des experts qui ne le voyaient pas arriver avant 2020. La machine en question a été capable de résoudre deux problèmes : l’un en modélisation moléculaire, l’autre dans l’affectation de ressources, dans des performances comparables aux machines classiques actuellement disponibles.

L’informatique quantique manipule des éléments d’information appelés qubits. Contrairement à l’informatique classique, le qubit ne se trouve pas dans un état physique symbolisant « 0 » ou « 1 », mais dans une superposition de ces deux états. Cependant, lorsque l’on voudra mesurer cette valeur, on trouvera « 0 » ou « 1 », exclusivement. La probabilité de mesurer « 0 » et la probabilité de mesurer « 1 » sont des caractéristiques d’un qubit (la somme des carrés de ces deux probabilités égale 1). Une autre caractéristique du qubit est sa phase.

Il existe plusieurs systèmes physiques qui présentent un modèle compatible avec les principes du qubit, comme le spin d’un électron ou la direction de la polarisation d’un photon. Le problème c’est que, quel que soit le système physique qui est utilisé, la mesure de l’état du qubit à l’instant de la mesure va modifier son état juste après la mesure. Or, mesurer, en informatique, c’est stocker l’information. Par exemple, si le système physique de support au qubit est le spin d’un électron, on sait parfaitement mesurer ce spin (c’est une direction) en soumettant l’électron à un champ magnétique. Juste avant la mesure, le qbit est dans un état de superposition. Lors de la mesure, l’électron sera dévié dans une direction ou dans l’autre d’une manière aléatoire (liée aux probabilités caractéristiques du qubit). Il prendra ainsi une représentation « 0 » ou « 1 », différente de l’état de superposition (sauf, bien sûr, s’il était déjà en « 0 » ou en « 1 »).

L’autre problème c’est de rendre tout cela utile et commercialement viable. D-WAVE a présenté un prototype fonctionnant à une température proche du zéro absolu (assez loin du laptop donc) et, à l’aide de registres de 16 qbits, permettant des démonstrations assez sommaires. D-WAVE a choisi de développer une solution rapidement opérationnelle, dont les composants peuvent être produits par l’industrie actuelle, et les vrais ordinateurs quantiques, s’ils existent un jour, ne ressembleront peut-être pas à celui-là.

Pour plus d'infos, voir l'articles sur The Register, et le blog de Geordie Rose, fondateur de D-WAVE.

(merci à Geneviève pour les illustrations)

Horror Tech Show 2006

Trouvé sur CNNMoney.com, un article-diaporama sur les pires bêtises de l'industrie high-tech en 2006 : comme prévu on y retrouve les absurdités des fonctions de sécurité de Vista, du duel des standards DVD-HD et du cynisme scandaleux de l'industrie musicale avec ses DRM. Mais aussi, plus étonnant, un sérieux dépit quand à la qualité des communications de Vonage, l'icône de la VoIP payante. Plus quelques américanismes...

The Brand

Mobile TV
Originally uploaded by lis186.

This operator with a colorful name claims they are one the 10th best known brands in the world. It might not be quite true (especially if you consider they are not in the US), but we can easily understand it has the potential to compete with the popularity of the Virgins or Cokes of this world. Their brand is at the heart of the company strategy. A few months ago their parent company (a fixed, incumbent operator in a western European country) rebranded all its activities to this new brand name. It’s been a major shakeup in the company, from top to bottom.
Before being acquired by a telco giant, this company started in the UK and has still there a young, fun and trendy image. It was easy (and frequent) to witness the cluelessness of original UK managers and marketeers faced with the parent company decisions taken by people wearing ties and speaking a latin language. Anyway, realism prevailed and the urge to put the acquired brand on top of all decisions is now nailed down into all processes. Let’s take one example : TV. Companies such as the one I’m talking about invested billions in their networks but were merely unable for a decade to derive significant revenues from anything else than voice and SMS. And this new potential killer application coming onto the radar, TV, would come soon on mobiles from a network that they would not own : DVB-H. They faced the issue of becoming a low-margin bit-pipe operator for new services, with an expensive 3G network just good enough to serve the “Long Tail” channels (many channels, few viewers per channel) when the mainstream service (most viewed TV channels) would be delivered by others to whom the fat profits would go. Not being able to circumvent this, and knowing that the only advantage they had is the time that this technology would take to spread across countries (mainly for frequency spectrum issues), they decided to print their name next to the “TV” name in each customer’s brains : if our customers think about TV and video on their mobiles, they should have our brand name in mind. It took several forms :
- branded applications to navigate across channels : your phone becomes an branded remote control.
- Production of specific channels : playlists, digests, daily news…a recently launched service aims at delivering video infotainment customized by the user and downloaded overnight onto the mobile, to be read on the train for instance.
- Programs only available to their customers (video on demand –VOD-) : in Spain they have short programs called mobisodes produced by a beer vendor, only available from the operator’s VOD portal.

- Integration of video and other features already familiar to users on their handsets : program guide, program alerts by SMS/MMS, user’s videos…to link TV viewing with the subsidized handset running their subscription as much as possible.
At the time alternative technologies will be widely available for viewing TV on mobile this company hopes it would have set themselves as The Name for providing such a service, regardless whether they own the network or not. They will get the fat profits.

Mad Fruits

28-10-05 orange fruit cocktail jacko's
Originally uploaded by sallysoose.

In 2005-2006 I enjoyed the experience of a one-year assignment as a product manager within the marketing team of a world-leading mobile operator. Together with Eurostar Frequent Traveller and Hilton Honors cards it left me with lots of stories and thoughts about what I saw, made and lived through. Innovation is the word. There'll be a few posts...

IP Multimedia Subsystem (end)

This second and last part of my introduction to IMS will focus on the services which come usually built-in : Messaging, Presence, Push-to-Talk over Cellular (POC), Conference, Group management

Messaging : IMS supports three messaging modes, each of those with multimedia content : the immediate messaging (based on the SIP MESSAGE method), session-based messaging and deferred delivery messaging, which is the IMS name for the well-known MMS service.

Presence : gives indication about the online status of a user and its ability, willingness to be contacted, and what are the preferred ways of contacting him. It is usually linked with instant messaging.

Presentities represent the users and provide information about this user to Watchers.

In the IMS architecture Presence Servers (PS) are considered like Application Servers (AS) and are contacted by SIP through the P-CSCF, I-CSCF and S-CSCF.

Push-to-Talk over Cellular (POC) : this service mimics the analog communication system traditionnally used by security forces, where users accessed a single frequency and could address all listeners at the same time by the push of a button (Motorola, you name it). With IMS it is all done with SIP signalling.

The big advantage of this system is its optimized use of resources in comparison with a conference system. In the IMS architecture the service is provided by PoC servers, either with a controlling role (one for the session) or a participating role (one for each participant). Once again, as it is IMS, PoC applies to any kind of multimedia content, and there is no standard restriction to the number of PoC sessions a user can have opened at the same time. This enable sophisticated services like video chat etc… The PoC service is especially interesting when coupled with the Presence service that will enable users to define to which PoC groups they belong (so that they receive group advertisement) and define exactly which PoC sessions they can be invited to and from which users.

Conferencing, with conference servers (AS) creating conference factories URI (Universal resource Identifier) to which participants connect.

Group Management so that users can store information about their contacts, conference participants,potential notifiers and their authorisation within the network and use it with all kinds of services like conference, PoC, presence and others.

I understand that the IMS architecture has been designed to enable concurrent communication multimedia services between users occasionally in roaming situations. This is achieved by standard components and interfaces and the use of SIP. Communication services already well delivered by proprietary Service Delivery Platforms (SDP) worldwide have been re-created based on IMS standards. The question with IMS is still : will it achieve the performance which is expected by the significant SIP overhead, and will it be deployed concurrently enough across operators so that the promises of universal interconnection and roaming brought by SIP will be delivered ?

Reference book : “The IMS  : IP multimedia concepts and services” by Miika Poikselkä et al – Wiley.

Bataille de Nains sur ZX81

J'ai distribué l'invitation à Pierre et Julien pour une séance d'initiation au ZX. Réponse négative et unanime à la découverte de l'invitation. A l'heure dite, Julien finit par se présenter. Après avoir nonchalamment écouté la présentation générale (le mode commande, le PRINT, les chaînes de caractères, les opérations, le mode programme), il s'approprie le clavier et tape ses premières lignes. Apparemment le GOTO est connu, mais il a vite besoin du SCROLL et du PAUSE. Après quelques tatonnements le premier programme est au point. Inspiration : bataille de nains dans une taverne, probablement inspiré des épopées Naheulbeuk ou Dofus. Listing, maestro :

A noter : l'espacement des numéros de ligne : 5. Pourquoi ? Dans mes exemples je prenais 10.

Back to the roots : Sinclair ZX81

çà y est je l'ai. Trouvé sur eBay, pour environ 85€, depuis le mini-site "the Sinclair shop". Un Sinclair ZX81 vrai de vrai, comme neuf, avec l'extension mémoire 16K de Memotech (moi j'avais celle de Sinclair). J'avais commandé une machine identique en Décembre 1982, en découpant le bon de commande dans "L'ordinateur de Poche" (j'ai toujours cet exemplaire). Je n'avais pas pu me payer un TRS-80 de Tandy qui devait faire environ 3000F à l'époque (mais j'allais squatter celui de mes voisines) alors je m'étais rabattu sur le ZX81 à 990F (monté) ! Le ZX81, sa mémoire de 1K, son clavier "sensitif", son BASIC, son processeur Z80, sa mini-imprimante...et surtout, le poste de TV qui faisait office d'écran. En 82, j'avais la télé dans la chambre (merci le ZX) !

J'ai passé des nuits de programmation et de reprogrammation (l'enregistrement des programmes sur cassettes était aléatoire), de lecture de magazines spécialisés, de recopie à la main des listings car l'imprimante m'a vite lâché. Le seul programme que j'aie acheté : Tyrannosaure (échapper au monstre, perdu dans le labyrinthe...). Comment faire tenir des programmes dans 1K, puis dans 16K, en rêvant sur tous les accessoires qui étaient proposés à l'époque : graphiques "haute résolution" (de base c'est 63*21), lecteur de floppy ! Je l'ai vendu quelques années plus tard à des gamins du quartier pour me payer un Amstrad CPC464, une autre aventure (et le vendeur d'eBay en a un aussi...je sens que je vais craquer).

Bon, il faut que je remette la main sur les bouquins que j'avais à l'époque : "Langage machine du ZX81" et "l'assembleur du Z80"....un grenier familial à fouiller !

Au fait, il fait quoi, le programme listé plus haut ? Ben voilà :

Un coup il écrit, un coup il efface...juste pour se dérouiller le basic ! Pour ceux qui voudraient se remettre dans le bain progressivement j'ai trouvé un petit émulateur Windows gentillet qui inclut le jeu "Tyrannosaure" : essayez !

IP Multimedia Subsystem – Part I

I start this article series about the IMS as it seems to be a major milestone towards an actual revolution in the way we use telecommunications and hence work and live. Maybe it won’t be because its misuse or poor adaptation to actual constraints, we’ll see. For the moment let’s try to understand it. I assume readers understand the underlying principles and acronyms as I will not systematically explain them.

The IP Multimedia Susbsystem is a set of standards and specifications coming from the mobile community (3GPP dealing with 3G mobile networks standardization) and which aims at providing everything it takes to sophisticated communication services to get established quickly, reach extended audiences and provide rich content. It’s not mobile only, it encompasses fixed networks as well, broadband and PSTN. Its main convergence issue is not between fixed and mobile but rather between circuit-switched (CS) and packet-switched (PS) networks. It uses lots of resources and functional components to achieve its goals and thus had to be complex, and is. Functional components and reference points between them are all standardized.

The IMS does not provide services as perceived by end-users, i.e. it does not hold content nor manage service-specific user interaction. The application part of these services has to be implemented by entities know as Application Servers (AS) which are not part of the IMS but interfaced to it in standardized way. AS can be integrated through SIP, OSA standards or CAMEL. The IMS is an enabler to these services and is an alternative to the vertical-integrated Service Delivery Platforms (SDP). However it is likely that IMS vendors will provide Presence, Messaging, Push-To-Talk (PoC) or Conference services built-in with their IMS package.

To make use of an IMS user terminals have to have IP connectivity. Very ambitiously, IMS standards specify IPv6 as their requirement to cope with the huge number of mobile objects requiring addressing, but in a pragmatic move IPv4 is supported. This connectivity can be achieved by 2G, 2,5G, 3G mobile networks or Wifi, ADSL etc…IMS includes bearer adaptation functions. IMS is accessed by SIP (Session Initiation Protocol) and SIP only. SIP combines the best of both worlds : IP’s ability to transfer content efficiently and telecoms’ efficiency in establishing communication between parties. Once communication is established services are provided using specific protocols such as RTP for delivering audio or video content. SIP dialogs will be managed by a set of CSCF functional modules (Call Session Control Function). The P-CSCF (Proxy) on the visited IMS will handle the users’s request first. It will then pass the request on the a I-CSCF (Interrogating) that will determine which is the S-CSCF (Serving) that sits within the IMS from which the service will be delivered.

Having the knowledge of the terminal and bearer capabilities at both ends the IMS will provide general-purpose services  : it will establish QoS agreements and make sure they are applied. It will provide user authentication and authorization and SIP confidentiality if needed. Identification and capability information for both services and users will be stored in the HSS, the IMS database. There is a standardized interface for service charging.

From this overall description we can see that the IMS is to face a number of blocks on the road :

-          Interoperability is likely to be a serious issue for two reasons : first, standardization is not complete, and second, the deployment of IMS across telcos will take time possibly making service roaming a challenge.

-          Complexity of the functional architecture is a challenge to robustness and performance : the chain of SIP requests and acknowledgements along a chain of CSCFs could prove suboptimal.

The good side is that it aims at replacing the entrenched silos which most SDPs are today and supports network convergence by its independence on bearers.

Reference book : “The IMS  : IP multimedia concepts and services” by Miika Poikselkä et al – Wiley.