What does this have to do with Twitter?  I’m getting there.

When Twitter was created, none of the core team were quite sure what it was they had built.  It was an open-ended platform with limited utility but powerful reach, and became a clean sheet onto which savvy users penned their own utility.  To date Twitter has shined as a mechanism to propagate ideas, status, and other forms of (guffaw) intellectual creativity in 140 characters or less, and has made it easy for people to track and follow those whose ideas, status, and guffaws are noteworthy to them.  More recently it represents an interesting and compelling way to search ideas, nearly in realtime, as they plot their course through the collective psyche of the twitterati, including such worthy topics as this morning’s #Skittles firestorm.  Still, many have questioned its utility.

This morning’s availability crisis (ostensibly brought on by the Twitterification of fans of the TV show “The View“) highlights one consequence of a growth management problem.   But that’s a simple issue:  more servers, please.  But as Twitter is now clearly tipping into the mainstream, the more complex challenge is how to maintain some sort of acceptable signal-to-noise ratio.  The vagaries of the general public may well threaten to soil our garden much as the growth of the internet to the wider corners of the intellectosphere rendered Usenet.. well… unusable.

Which brings me back to the Crest Plaza parking lot.  With all of the self-ascribed “Social Media Experts” running around encouraging corporate clients to blast their marketing messages out over Twitter, and with the influx of celebrities into the Tweetspace enabled by the simple power to publish by sending messages over their mobile phones, there’s certainly lots of messaging traffic.  But all of this “grass roots marketing” means that, like the beginning of baseball season, there is a whole lot of pitching and not a lot of catching.

The presence of an increasing number of celebrities on twitter, in particular, are illuminating a disturbing trend.  Hockey phenom Alexander Ovechkin rather sweetly tried to maintain two-way conversation with his fans but found it difficult to scale.  His intentions were clearly sincere but obviously having thousands of fans buzzing his mobile phone became a killer.  As of this morning, Ashton Kutcher has 201,869 followers but himself is only listening to 48.  There are clearly practical limits to how many people we can specifically converse with.  I don’t begrudge these ratios, but anyone who thinks that this is truly conversation has never been in a bar.  We live in a celebrity-obsessed culture, and clearly more and more people crave more and more access to their favourite stars.  But just because you’re following William Shatner, does that mean you’re communicating?

Likewise, there is only so much that we as individuals can absorb from the sphere of things we declare our interest in.  At the risk of sounding McLuhanist, the form may be much more important here than the content.  My concern is that the former is quickly overwhelming the latter.

Speaking firsthand, I have sent replies via twitter to well-known Twitterati like Mathew Ingram, Fred Wilson, Ian Rogers, and others whom I also communicate with via email, Facebook, and other media.  I’ve never actually heard back from those tweets, but I can’t take it terribly personally since I know these folks have replied to other messages sent by me via phone, email and Facebook.  Are they really listening on Twitter?  I’m not sure that, at a sufficient level of scale, that is possible in practical terms.  I once asked Robert Scoble (who oddly follows more than follow him) how he could keep track of so many people (at the time, and this was in 2008, that was around 2100).  His answer was, essentially, that he doesn’t.  He checks in when he can and based on sheer volume there is almost always something that is interesting to him.  It is akin to standing behind a dumptruck that is 99% rock and 1% gold and trying to grab nuggets while the tipper lifts.

This doesn’t seem like the solution to any problem.  I still occasionally find topics of interest via twitter, though as my network expands the numbers are fewer and the time spent increases.  Moreover, Twitter appears to have become better at empowering the illusion of conversation, rather than actual conversation — this makes it the perfect hangout for the fame-obsessed, the celebrities, corporations, and various other notorious self-promoters.

So while Twitter continues to grow thanks to its amorphous nature, eventually measures are going to need to be put in place to mitigate the signal-to-noise ratio and preserve (or pinpoint) the service’s utility.  Embedded in this is both risk and opportunity.  The risk is that a gatekeeper placed at the wrong entrance will turn away users.  The oportunity is that charging a toll at certain entry and exit points may enable the company to establish a viable, independent financial future, a topic which is the source of considerable debate lately.

Ultimately though, Twitter’s long term success is dependent upon more pitches landing in gloves.  With such a strong, open, and growing network of individuals, the end result of a lot fewer broken windows benefits us all.

This is a critical opportunity for you to vote against Rogers with the only ballot that counts: your wallet. You too will be able to purchase unlocked 3G iPhones from him on eBay about a week later.

Why go to the trouble? Well, let’s just say I’m conflicted. I want the new iPhone (love my old one) but I don’t want Uncle Ted taking my purchase of one as an endorsement of his brutal pricing plan. The Globe & Mail makes the following comparison:

“For example, for $75 a month, Rogers provides 300 weekday voice minutes, 750 megabytes of data and 100 text messages. In the United States, a customer gets 450 weekday voice minutes, unlimited data and 200 text messages for the same price.”

750MB for a frequent iPhone user, particularly one who uses the navigation and web browsing tools, is nothing. But in particular it’s the three-year lock-in that requires the greatest consideration. At that end of the deal, Rogers has you by the short-and-curlies. And your obligation to them will almost certainly outlast your 3G iPhone. Needless to say, many of us are pissed.

So how does it work? Well, let’s just say that you can finally thank the French for something.

Thanks to French law, it is illegal for Apple (or any mobile phone handset maker or carrier) to sell a locked phone in the French marketplace without also making the same device available in the popular pay-as-you-go mode, fully unlocked and portable to any carrier.

This puts a stick in the mud for Apple’s lock-in plan and means that France will likely be selling a substantial number of 3G iPhones, until ZiPhone learns how to software unlock them, to eBay resellers like my friend.

So yes, please go and sign the petition at RuinediPhone.com but, since I know you’re going to buy one anyway, get the French iPhone instead of buckling under peer pressure to lock into Rogers’ data plan. It might cost you more in the short run (ironic) but in the long run you will force things to change.

Software unlocking has already forced several key changes in Apple’s strategy that favour the consumer. But a flop of Rogers’ package pricing on the Canadian market can send a clear signal to both companies, and their shareholders. Industry Canada, which should be paying attention, can and most definitely should censure Rogers, and its wireless competitors for a long history of market-limiting pricing (not limited to the iPhone launch in Canada) that has rendered our country a wireless backwater.

There is, in most respects, not much room for the little guy. Still, many companies attempt to eke out a living by raising capital and earning free cash flow on the basis of moving the needle down a couple of stairs in the telecom industry’s giant race to the bottom. Frankly speaking, as consumers, we need these guys … they create the price pressure that leads to market pressure that forces the cabal to lower their prices. Without them we’d all still be paying $1/minute to call one or two counties over. But rarely (and I suspect Bernie Ebbers would verify this) do they ever make any real money over the long-term.

Because of my history as one of Cisco’s early Packet Telephony product managers, and having architected and helped to launch a few different services including BuzMe and RingCentral, I see a lot of VoIP deals. I’ve taken to referring to many of them as “stupid phone tricks” (in a nod to Letterman) which are clearly designed to take advantage of some gap in arbitrage within the telecom industry.

Unfortunately, this has been the model of telecom “innovation” for many, many years. The first Cowboys in the telecom game were of course the CallBack kids. They allowed you to make calls from Brazil to the USA, for example, paying the long-distance rate for calling from the USA to Brazil instead of the other way around by “ringing both ends” of the call after you first dialed their local or toll-free number to instantiate the call. This significant inconvenience was trumped by the massive savings incurred for folks living in Brazil calling to their USA-resident relatives.

With long-distance deregulation came the rise of prepaid calling card services, which did something similar. Again you traded the convenience of just simply dialing the person you wanted to call for having to call a pilot number, entering a complex string of unmemorable digits, and THEN entering the number you wanted to call in order to save a little dough. The services made money, though, because you and I would usually lose our cards or forget our numbers before we fully expended the value in the cards. This model is called “breakage”. To my utter disappointment this represented the larger part of the market I was dealing with while at Cisco.

More than 8 years ago I recall being asked by my boss, Alistair Woodman, to write an opportunity evaluation of the recently-ratified SIP protocol. My response, over the course of weeks of researching and talking to everyone involved, was a breathless vision espousing nothing short of a complete re-think of the entire Telecom industry. SIP has some epic flaws and paradoxes, like its assumption that we’d all be on IPv6 by 2001, and its paradoxical empowerment of edge devices while making no accommodations for firewall/NAT traversal or P2P.

But it was a pretty good stab at unhanding control of telecom from the cabal and placing it in the hands of scrappy innovators. And as the VON shows once attested, there are some pretty feisty and intelligent people lurking within the telecom business. For a time I hoped to have been one of the more noteworthy ones.

With the benefit of hindsight we now know that SIP just hasn’t panned out (certainly not in the way I had hoped it would). It’s become just another signaling protocol in the transport of fairly uninteresting voice calls within the existing structure of telecom. Let me repeat that in another way: The incumbents took a protocol which was conceived and designed to blow them out of the water, and used it to cost-optimize their networks. As a protocol, SIP is incredibly successful in having propagated in Telecom in the less than 7 years it’s been deployable, but I suspect its effects on the industry would today leave its creators a bit cold.

My breathless assertions that thanks to SIP the web geeks would take over Telecom — first derived in 1997 and held by me until at least 2002 — have never even come close to fruition. SIP, because it unbundles signaling from the calling path and especially because it allows for rich metadata to travel through the network with SIP messages, is rife with potential for adding value — but no one, not even Skype (which uses a protocol clearly inspired by SIP but which fixes a lot of its problems) has deployed it in a way that takes complete advantage of this to stimulate innovation.

A few weeks ago I wrote about Cubic Telecom. There’s a small amount of real innovation there, but it largely falls into my “Stupid Phone Tricks” category. It might or might not save you a lot of money making and receiving long-distance calls while you roam on your mobile phone, but does nothing to abate the greater crime that is mobile roaming charges. After I wrote about Cubic, David Pogue of the NY Times was attracted into their orbit, but got burned when others realized Cubic’s rates weren’t quite so attractive as they’d said they were. Controversy erupted and their launch marketing was irreversibly damaged (see here also) by the Streisand Effect of their attempts to correct and adjust perception.

A Googling of “telecom innovation” yields 10,700+ hits but, sadly, no real innovation. What you will read, instead, are examples of creative cost-optimization (Voice Mail was really a way to eliminate the answering machine at home, and the receptionist at the office). You’ll also see some incredibly creative and extravagant attempts to defeat the inconvenience associated with the CallBack model. Cool, but not fundamentally enabling.

What Cubic is presently caught up in is the fact that their dubious cost savings are hampered by the fact that calling mobile phones, for example, in Europe is always going to be expensive and hugely differentiated in terms of pricing from calling land lines in Europe. The rise of draconian mobile pricing models combined with the steep decline in global long-distance calling rates results in a more and more limited opportunity to cost-optimize and more and more pitfalls for the consumer. Unfortunately, Cubic’s a great example of how this happens and how it can bite one in the ass.

There are a number of artificial bottoms in the telecom industry. Long-Distance was the first and most obvious of these: when there was sufficient market pressure from a few successful VoIP guys (and other telco competitors) to reduce costs, the incumbents simply did so. Why? Their costs to provide long distance were arbitrary. Their only consideration was how much margin they could take without losing customers.

There are a couple of false bottoms in mobile at the moment (who am I kidding, there are half a dozen) including roaming, long-distance, and SMS. SMS is a great modern example of this and here’s why:

The cost for a mobile network to transact an SMS message are incalculably small — on par with your ISP handling an email message. Yet it’s become an enormous cash cow for the mobile phone industry — imagine if your ISP charged you a penny for every email sent or received. A small number of companies such as hotxt (now trutap) rose to try and take a notch out of the carriers on this front, but were ultimately thwarted by the fact that they have to take pot shots at the carriers from within their own ecosystem.

It’s not that easy to attack the SMS business model by requiring users to instead install an app and send and receive messages over wireless data, which is also ridiculously expensive.  It’s kind of like borrowing from Peter to pay Paul, and in any case I’m not sure what it accomplishes for the third-party service.  Not fun. And not particularly innovative.

There is encroachment now, by mobile telecom into terrestrial telecom, and subsequently by platforms like the iPhone and OpenMoko and the rumored GPhone. I guess this means there’s some hope for change. But all of them appear to be embracing the traditional approach to telecom and stepping up to milk the cow in collusion with the big carriers. And this, friends, is a shame. Because innovation will only be barely perceptible if we continue to allow Telecom Monopolists to write the rulebook.

-Ian.

There is some apparent overlap in both offerings, in that they are both essentially smart CallBack services.  But the positioning and nuances of the service offering are in fact quite a bit different.  While on one hand I think MaxRoam represents a more comprehensive solution targeted exclusively at mobile roamers, I think that Lypp is a significantly more frictionless service which you can make use of in myriad ways, not exclusively to avoid long-distance bilking on your mobile phone.

In particular the Lypp API, coupled with the fact that you can easily instantiate calls with multiple parties via SMS and Instant Messaging,  is a game-changer.  The notion of spontaneous conferencing is actually, finally, possible.  And if you coupled Lypp (via its API) with a smart calendar-based scheduling system you’d have yourselves a pretty kick-ass enterprise conferencing solution.

But overall, the Lypp model applies wherever you have a situation where two parties elect to chat via voice while using some other medium.  Viewed from this 30,000 foot precipice, you can see that Lypp has utility in applications as far-flung as online dating, business-to-business calling, and even chat radio shows, call centres, and unified communications.

This means that in some ways Lypp competes with Jangl and Jajah, however it should probably in the end be marketed more as a toolkit like VOXEO.  Come to think of it, all of those companies are run by friends of mine, too.

What I find ironic is that the base concept of CallBack is not new … it’s been around since the early 1980s, when smart telecom entrepreneurs realized it was substantially more expensive to call from, say, Brazil to the USA than it was to call from the USA to Brazil.  These CallBack drones, much like the Prepaid Calling Card industry, were among the first major VoIP platform customers of ours when I was a lowly Product Manager in the Packet Telephony Division at Cisco.

Most of those companies died or were absorbed as their major market differentiator (price) eroded and they were commoditized by Big Telco.

CallBack services are generally easy to replicate on VoIP platforms.  What’s having a disruptive effect now is that with so many open-platform VoIP solutions and generally cheap computational power, it is possible to rapidly develop scalable telecom applications in ways that were formerly only accessible to the likes of Nortel and Cisco.

It’s clear though that among this latest batch of telecom evolutionaries there is some real innovation.  There are, however, lessons to learn:  While the clear temptation of most of these businesses will be to hinge their value
proposition on lower-cost in exchange for slightly lower convenience, this is a losing business.

The challenge is to innovate and let new capabilities and opportunities continue to drive innovation and product design.  This is an area where no Big Telco executive has any real lasting insight.  Elephants are terrible tapdancers.

It’s definitely a secondary phone service, as when you instantiate calls it actually signals their VoIP-based call back service to “ring both ends”. Yes, it’s a CallBack service. The result is a fairly long wait time (20-30 seconds) to connect calls. But the savings when you roam across continents or even in the next country over are profound. The fact that it operates on a pre-paid, non-subscription model helps you cost-justify it as a secondary phone.

I’ll skip the phone, thanks, but I plan to use it, but only for incoming calls, when I travel to the U.S. as an alternative to a prepaid plan with the evil AT&T. It also does SMS at reasonable rates but, as yet, not data. So I’ll still be extorted for using my BlackBerry and iPhone on the road.

Feature request: One major issue with using a secondary phone is that when you make outgoing calls, nobody knows it’s you. My calls are far more likely to be avoided by my board members and business contacts because they don’t know the number. Problematically I don’t want to give them that number and add it to my swelling list of phone numbers because it adds complexity and creates a potential dead-end: my MaxRoam number, unlike my mobile phone number, is not mine… and I can’t take it with me.

To resolve this, and much of this depends on the quality of the termination networks and the strength of their relationships with these termination partners, MaxRoam could ask me which phone number I want to identify myself as when instantiating outbound calls via their web site. They could then rewrite the outbound dialing number on their terminating gateways for the leg of the call destined to whomever I’m calling so that it appears as it should on their phone and my name, etc. pops up.

Of course, there are others among us who might enjoy that anonymity. >:)

A problem for MaxRoam in the short term is that all this fiddling, plus the extra call wait times (75% of calls are incomplete, so 25-30 seconds just to get a busy signal or somebody’s voice mail will get frustrating), is not for the faint-hearted consumer market. I anticipate that they will develop a rabid audience of tens of thousands of global roamers who absolutely love their service, but until big strides are made in the usability model it’ll be difficult to break through to the broader market and really kick the snot out of the mobile carriers.

Their greater effect may be to sensitize the mobile phone consumer market further to the gouging that occurs between carriers for roaming, and the utter fleecing which carriers subject their customers to for Long-Distance. Given the myriad benefits in reducing operating cost for VoIP, and given that VoIP has been widely deployed in mobile phone networks for more than 5 years, it is positively criminal that they want me to pay $2/min. to call Brussels from my mobile phone while I’m at home.

I’m worried that, like Vonage, companies like Cubic will invest significant dollars to champion the charge to fairer pricing in mobile telecom, only to get smote by the carriers as they finally cave under consumer, media, political, and market pressures and adjust their margins accordingly.

But why? When you’re looking for answers, as they say, follow the money. The NYTimes (now mercifully free for you to read) reports on their blog that Apple, with their recent price cut, is effectively taking a loss on each iPhone and making it up on the fees paid to them via the Wireless Carriers. Well, duh. This should be no surprise to folks who know the wireless industry well. The only nuance here is that Apple has altered the way the money flows over traditional mobile phone handset makers, who are content to eke out slim margins selling phones directly to carriers, who then take a hit on the sale of the phone which is subsidized by your ongoing usage fees. As I’ve been trying to point out, the business model they’ve copied is that of Research in Motion.

There is some smarts there, but not much. Apple has clearly miscalculated the confrontation that it is about to face with its users. Apple has a vested interest in “locking in” your iPhone to a contract with their partner carriers: this is the Cathedral. They have also borne witness to the powerful effects of releasing their products out into the wild and benefiting from the vibrant hacking community which has grown up around some of their products, such as the Apple TV Hackers, and of course the flourishing OS X third-party development community (which could be likened to Eric S. Raymond’s notion of a Bazaar).

With all of those lessons in mind, Apple’s decision-making around the iPhone appears to be somewhat quixotic. But it is, for now, a depressing practical reality of the wireless world that even Apple cannot break the cabal and catalyze the wireless industry to flourish amid an internet-style openness. Apple is attempting to preserve the “lock” on its customers because carriers have a lock on the market. And we cannot expect Apple to lose money for the benefit of the greater community in the interests of strong-arming the carriers.

Or can we? If they don’t, then Google might. The GoogPhone has become the new source of promise for we proletariat who formerly clicked our heels together and begged for Apple to bust the wireless industry cabal. Google has the altruism, the mandate, and the heft to push the carriers around much moreso than RIM or Apple. It is also going after spectrum, as we all know. Even if it gets it, this doesn’t mean it will use it, because it’ll become a substantial bargaining chip when it approaches carriers to provide distribution and access for its devices.

So Apple might be getting a short-term spike out of its iPhone product line only to be subverted by Google, which will represent an interesting conflict-of-interest for Google CEO and Apple Board Member Eric Schmidt. If that’s the case, then Apple has forfeited a long-term future in the mobile world in an effort to work within, rather than challenge, the fundamental realities of the wireless industry.

In the meantime, el-Steve-o is talking pretty tough to the iPhone unlocking crowd (which, let’s face it, is now probably approaching the majority of iPhone users). Of course, Jobs could be borrowing a page from Yasser Arafat: talking tough when his constituency (the carriers) are listening but sliding back-handed messages of peace (and unfettered use of iPhones) under the table. If there’s a volume horizon when the cost of producing iPhones becomes less than they’re forced to sell them for sometime in Apple’s future, then this is quite possible.

The fundamental problem here is that being an open platform in an interconnected world is about more than just having an open device, like a PC. In fact, PCs have gotten a free ride of sorts because the Internet via broadband has always been more-or-less unencumbered. Wireless is just the opposite, and even devices like the OpenMoko will still be tethered within the Wireless Egosystem, until carriers stop caring about how much data you use and where you use it.

The problem is: will they ever?

September 21, 2003

Waiting For Spielberg By MATTHEW ROSE

Unlike most urban legends, the one about the Iranian exile stuck at the Paris airport for 15 years is true. Surrounded by a mountain of his possessions near the Paris Bye Bye lounge at Terminal 1 in Charles de Gaulle International Airport, Merhan Karimi Nasseri is still there after all these years — a celebrity homeless person.

Planted on the 1970’s red plastic bench he calls home, and surrounded by stacks of newspapers and magazines, Nasseri, also known as Alfred or ”Sir, Alfred” (title and comma appropriated from a mistake in a letter from British immigration), has organized his life’s belongings into a half-dozen Lufthansa cargo boxes, various suitcases and unused carry-on luggage. On a nearby coffee table spotted with aluminum ashtrays, Nasseri’s universe includes a pair of alarm clocks, an electric shaver, a hand mirror and a collection of press clippings and photographs to establish his present and his recent past. He seems both settled — and ready to go.

To the pilots, airport staff, fast-food merchants and millions who have passed through the terminal on their way to somewhere else, the 58-year-old Nasseri has become a postmodern icon — a traveler whom no one will claim. Little do they know that he is on his way to becoming a Hollywood icon, too. Inspired by Nasseri’s intriguing tale of lost identity, bureaucratic limbo and persistence, Steven Spielberg has bought the rights to his life story as the basis for the new Tom Hanks vehicle, ”The Terminal.”

”I realize I am famous,” Nasseri says in his soft, almost giggly voice, a gravelly mix of his native Persian, the airport French he’s picked up from the loudspeakers and the cigarettes he’s always smoking. As if to prove his fame, he pats a briefcase stuffed with his press clippings. ”I wasn’t interesting until I came here.”

Nasseri’s story is difficult to piece together. Over the years, he has claimed many things about his origins. At one time his mother was Swedish, another time English. Nasseri’s effectively reinvented himself in the Charles de Gaulle airport and denies these days that he’s Iranian, deflecting any conversation about his childhood in Tehran. (”He pretends he doesn’t speak Persian,” his longtime lawyer, Christian Bourguet, says. ”He was interviewed by Iranian journalists and made believe he didn’t understand.”) When we first met two years ago, he insisted that the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees was attempting to locate his parents in order to establish his identity. But a spokeswoman for the agency dismissed the assertion as ”pure folly.”

Early on in his saga, Nasseri maintained that he was expelled from his homeland for antigovernment activity in 1977. According to a number of reports, Nasseri protested against the regime of Shah Mohammed Reza Pahlevi while a student in England, and when he returned to Iran, found himself imprisoned, and shortly thereafter exiled.

He bounced around Europe for a few years with temporary refugee papers, alighting finally in Belgium, where he was awarded official refugee status in 1981. He traveled to Britain and France without difficulty until 1988, when he landed at Charles de Gaulle airport after being denied entry into Britain, because, he contends, his passport and refugee certificate were stolen in a mugging on a Paris subway. Nasseri could not prove who he was, nor offer proof of his refugee status. So he moved into the Zone d’attente, a holding area for travelers without papers.

He stayed for days, then weeks — then months, then years. As his bizarre odyssey stretched on, Bourguet, the noted French human rights lawyer, took on the case, and the news media piled on. Articles appeared around the world, and Nasseri became the subject of three documentary films. (Oddly, apparently none of his friends or relatives have attempted to contact him.)

ike any number of Samuel Beckett characters, Nasseri has redefined the concept of waiting. But he remains busy, and during office hours when he’s not meeting filmmakers or members of the press, he collects McDonald’s soda tops and endlessly considers his situation in a sprawling, 1,000-plus-page diary that chronicles his journey to nowhere. These rambling handwritten notes recount his encounters with just about everyone he’s met, reporting faithfully everything from the details of his paper chase to some of the witty things he’s said (”I’m not Henry Kissinger”). Nasseri also asks most visitors to sign his journal.

An effete, balding man, Nasseri is well groomed (he washes daily in the men’s room and sends his donated Marks & Spencer clothes to the dry cleaners) with finely manicured fingernails. He smokes compulsively and is forever reaching for his pouch of Pall Mall rolling tobacco. At one point during our interview he coughs, adding with his characteristic sly humor, ”Maybe I caught SARS here in the airport.”

In an eerily Warholian relationship, Nasseri’s closest neighbors at the airport are a photo booth and a photocopy machine. Unlike most movie types, Nasseri does not have a cell phone, and he eats regularly at the McDonald’s in the food court 100 feet away. (”I like the fish,” he says.) The only green in his immediate environment is, ironically, the Sortie (Exit) sign.

In the Spielberg film, which begins shooting this month, Hanks is transformed into a refugee whose country disappears in a diplomatic wink of an eye. As chaos ravages his homeland, Hanks is rendered stateless, his passport turned into an eBay collectible. He’s grounded: a stranger in a strange New York airport. But Hanks is cured of his airport disease and soars to new heights (and, who knows, perhaps another Oscar), thanks to the Hollywood bombshell Catherine Zeta-Jones, who plays Hanks’s love interest, a flight attendant. Nasseri has had no such luck with the ladies and complains that there are no nightclubs in his airport. ”There’s no pleasure,” he says.

While Bourguet confirms that Spielberg’s company, DreamWorks, has in fact bought the rights to his client’s life story, Spielberg himself would not discuss ”The Terminal,” its plot nor Nasseri’s contract. Marvin Levy, a DreamWorks spokesman, confirms that a financial agreement was signed. However, he cautions, ”Mr. Nasseri’s story was an inspiration for the original treatment for ‘The Terminal.’ The film is not his story.”

Rumors of a $275,000 fee for the rights to Nasseri’s life story and certain consulting duties have circulated. ”It’s less than $1 million,” Bourguet says, adding that the money hasn’t changed the predicament of his client. ”While he became a bit richer, Alfred is extremely paranoid and confused.”

Certainly, Nasseri may well be one of the only people on the planet not to have seen a Spielberg production. Asked what he thinks of Hanks, Nasseri replies straight-faced, ”Is he Japanese?”

Regardless of whether Hanks manages to capture the refugee’s deadpan delivery, the Hollywood retelling of Nasseri’s odyssey will undoubtedly include a first-class ticket to the American dream.

Nasseri’s real-life ending, however, is still up in the air.

”Alfred himself will have trouble leaving the airport,” says Glen Luchford, a fashion photographer cum director whose 2001 mockumentary, ”Here to Where,” attempted just such a scenario, with the director, played by Paul Berczeller, failing to tempt Nasseri beyond the concrete gardens of Charles de Gaulle.

”Alfred has to accept that he’s free,” Luchford says sadly. ”But with freedom comes responsibility. He represents people’s worst fears — the idea they might be procrastinating all their lives and end up being rooted to the spot.”

asseri cannot be forcibly moved or repatriated. He is protected by a number of international refugee statutes. According to Bourguet, he is legally free to leave the airport. All Nasseri has to do is sign the identity papers the French provided him in 1999. But the papers identify him as Iranian and don’t recognize his adopted name of Sir, Alfred. And so he can’t — or won’t- sign them: a testament to either patience, or madness.

Nasseri is doubtful about attending the premiere of ”The Terminal,” although his face lights up at the prospect. ”I would probably have technical problems with my papers in Los Angeles,” he says, before adding that he’ll likely leave the airport ”in September or October.”

If he does decide to finally exit the departure lounge, Nasseri could go to any number of places in the world. He says Florida has invited him, and, yes, why not New York, when ”I take over DreamWorks”? (The company is based in California.) And what of the plastic red bench, which has served as his de facto home for the last 15 years and must by now be a collector’s item?

”I’ll take it to DreamWorks,” he says with a smile. ”And send it by FedEx .”

Matthew Rose is a writer and artist living in Paris.

-Ian.

Begin forwarded message:

> From: Tom
> Date: Fri Aug 1, 2003 9:32:24 AM US/Pacific
> To: fork [at] xent [dot] com
> Subject: Can You Here Me Now
>
>> From http://www.arstechnica.com/
>
> Middle East mobile firm shut out in Iraq
>
> Posted 8/1/2003 – 2:09AM, by Fred “zAmboni” Locklear
> Getting a foot in the door can lead to opportunities, but it can also
> lead
> to some squashed toes. Using the confusion in a Iraq as a cover screen
> the
> Bahriani mobile firm Batelco spent $5 million setting up and beginning
> GSM
> service in Baghdad on July 22. One problem. Batelco had not obtained a
> license to start services and promptly told to cease service. The U.S.
> started seeking bids for three mobile phone licenses on Sunday, so
> Betelco
> could just apply, right? Watch out toes, here comes the crunch.
>
> Batelco was probably trying to get the jump on others since licensing
> rules had not been set up and there have been rumblings the U.S. would
> craft rules to favor other U.S. companies. It was a $5 million gamble
> that
> could have been parlayed into a lucrative mobile license and contract.
> On
> Thursday, rules were set up for Iraqi mobile phone licenses and
> Batelco,
> along with some of Europe’s largest mobile companies will be left out
> of
> the bidding.
>
> ” The rules – issued by the coalition authorities ahead of a
> bidders’
> conference in Jordan on Thursday – ban governments from “directly
> or
> indirectly own(ing) more than 5% of any single bidding company or
> single company in consortia”.
>
> That rules out – among others – Orange and T-Mobile, two of
> Europe’s
> biggest operators, because the French and German governments still
> own
> significant stakes in their parent companies.”
>
> The BBC also suggests the rules have stipulations which will favor U.S.
> companies. The restrictions could be seen as preventing a government
> from
> having influence over services provided to Iraq. On the other hand, one
> could argue companies from coalition nations should be barred,
> especially
> since they are the ones setting up the rules.
>
> [1]http://www.bayarea.com/mld/mercurynews/news/special_packages/iraq/
> 6402112.htm
> [2]http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/business/3114591.stm
>

Wi-Fi’s true believers see powerful ‘grass-roots’ force

John Markoff NYT Monday, July 14, 2003

  SUN VALLEY, Idaho Is the Wi-Fi boom about to bust? Even though that has lately become the fashionable view, the answer is probably no.

Critics argue that there are too many competitors trying to deliver high-speed wireless connections to the Internet. Prices for most commercial Wi-Fi services are too high, they say, and free or subsidized operations abound, including those like the one McDonald’s started rolling out last week at its fast food restaurants in San Francisco.

All this will make it practically impossible, the skeptics insist, for anyone to build a profitable business in Wi-Fi, a short-range wireless radio technology that frees personal computers from their physical tethers to the Internet.

A surprising number of true believers in Wi-Fi were present at this famed mountain resort during an annual conference, organized by the investment banker Herbert Allen, that brings together technology, media and entertainment industry leaders.

Intel, in particular, is betting a lot of its own money on Wi-Fi. And that may be exactly what the new technology needs to succeed.

Intel’s two top executives, Craig Barrett and Andrew Grove, were here this year to preach the virtues of Wi-Fi, in the belief that it will be a powerfully disruptive force in the telecommunications industry.

It has certainly been a disruptive force at Intel. The industry and analysts have focused their attention on the current frenzy to build out wireless Internet locations known as hot spots at airports, coffee houses and hotels. But Intel has a much bolder wireless plan in the works: it wants to close the so-called “last-mile” gap between homes and the Internet backbone with cheap, super-fast connections so that businesses can deliver interactive entertainment and a host of other digital products and services right into America’s living rooms and dens.

The new Intel bet is remarkable given that the company initially backed the wrong wireless standard, putting its resources behind a competing standard known as Home RF. But Intel, the world’s biggest computer chip maker, changed its strategy after company executives realized the power and potential pervasiveness of the unregulated Wi-Fi wireless networking standard.

The Wi-Fi standard was developed and commercialized at Apple Computer as early as 1999. Ultimately, though, it gained widespread popularity on its own, Mr. Barrett acknowledged in an interview here, as a grass-roots, from-the-bottom-up movement. That success stands in striking contrast to top-down wireless data strategies, like the 3G cellular approach pushed by the telecom industry, which has so far been an expensive bust.

Barrett now says that people who predict a Wi-Fi shakeout are missing the point, as well as failing to see the deeper implications of the technology. “What is missing is the realization of how many legs this technology has,” he said.

In the three months since Intel introduced its new wireless PC chips, the company has become the dominant force in the Wi-Fi market. It is now putting Wi-Fi circuitry in all of its chip sets for portable computers, investing widely in Wi-Fi industry start-ups and spending almost its entire annual marketing budget in a $300 million advertising campaign trumpeting the virtues of its unwired Centrino brand.

“Intel has raised the level of the water and is floating all the boats,” said Glenn Fleishman, editor of Wi-Fi Networking News, a Web-based daily newsletter.

Of even greater potential import, Intel plans to start a test in Texas in a few months that will use a combination of wireless technologies, including Wi-Fi, to bring broadband Internet connections directly to homes. Last week the company quietly announced that it was teaming with a small equipment maker, Alvarion, of Tel Aviv, Israel, to back a complementary wireless standard that is intended to send data over distances of as much as 30 miles and at speeds of up to 70 megabits per second. The data rate is high enough to comfortably stream high-definition television video broadcasts, and the range makes it possible to quickly deploy a system in a large urban or suburban area.

By comparison, current Wi-Fi technology is limited to several hundred feet and speeds of 11 megabits per second. The Intel test, however, will explore using the 802.16 standard, known as WiMax, to distribute the data to Wi-Fi antennas in local neighborhoods. If Intel is able to jumpstart the market to reach millions of homes with a relatively inexpensive interactive data and video service, the technology could quickly alter the communications landscape. That is already starting to happen. There is now an explosion of Wi-Fi hot spots in hotels, coffee shops, restaurants and airports, and a new wave of handheld gadgets will soon supplement portable personal computers for a class of mobile workers that analysts are calling windshield warriors.

In a speech here, Barrett sketched a portrait of a rapidly growing market. There are now about 40 million Wi-Fi users, he said, and new access points are selling at the rate of about 15,000 a day, which makes Wi-Fi a much faster-growing technology than cellular telephony.

While prices for connection times are certain to keep falling, industry executives say they are already seeing usage patterns that suggest that Wi-Fi commercial services are working and are here to stay. Moreover, they say they believe the services will complement and not compete with free services that are emerging in urban areas around the country. “We have a good business model in hotels, said Dave Vucina, chief executive officer of Wayport, a provider of Wi-Fi hot spots in hotels, airports, restaurants and other locations that is based in Austin, Texas.

In the hotels that Wayport serves, he said, the company is seeing between 8 and 12 percent nightly usage rates for each occupied room. He said he believed that the rate could go as high as 15 to 24 percent. Those numbers are credible, industry analysts said, because out of the 40 million business travelers in the United States, 30 million now carry personal computers when they hit the road.

The central issue in the debate is whether those workers will be able to meet their data needs with next-generation cellular telephone networks, or whether the far higher data rates available on Wi-Fi networks will prove preferable.

Copyright © 2003 The International Herald Tribune

Wireless and Web Buzz Again as Wifi Catches On Tue May 13, 4:09 PM

/By Christopher Noble/

PARIS (Reuters) – Landgrabbing and takeover frenzy are again dominating technology headlines as if the Internet bubble had never burst and giving old buzzwords a new lease of life.

At the center of it is WiFi, a technology that allows users of laptop computers and other gadgets to access the Internet without the usual struggle with wires and mismatched phone jacks.

France, late to the party, is now jumping aboard with a series of announcements in the last few days.

The race is on around the world to roll out WiFi access points known as “hotspots,” which for some entrepreneurs offer the prospect of turning mobile Internet access into revenue.

Each wireless (news <http://us.rd.yahoo.com/DailyNews/manual/*http://search.news.yahoo.com/search/news?p=%22wireless%22&c=&n &yn=c&c=news&cs=nw> – web sites <largest hotspot in France. A consortium of companies is now putting a WiFi network in the French capital’s subway stations and bus stops.