telekomunikacije – telecommunications 2004
Slovenia, Portorož, November 10. 2004
Mobility and digital cities
Risto Linturi, Chairman, R. Linturi Plc
Distinguished audience,
slide 2
I have once before visited Slovenia. That was thirty years ago – post hippie decade. Interrail connected world’s youth. 96% alcohol felt like virtual reality today. 15 countries in 30 days. My friend called his mother once. I was raised to save money and only sent two postcards. Same 70’s my first computer called random telephones in Helsinki. With a synthesised voice my computer said: “Do you like to play a game with me. Press one.” I quit this spamming because I was afraid Helsinki Telephone would fire me but really many people did connect with my computer to play.
Now we are all connected. Not only to our close ones but all spammers of the world. If my daughter forgets her key, I can answer the doorbell from my mobile phone and open the door for her. Finns pay their metro, tram and movie tickets with their mobile phones. Most cabs have GPS phones and orders connect directly to the closest free taxi. Some reindeer and wolves also carry phones, but they do not belong to digital cities and I need to stick to my given topic.
In mid nineties I had this idea that a virtual duplicate of Helsinki should be created on the web. I was technology director for Helsinki Telephone then. Virtual reality was a metaphor for telepresence. The idea originates from ancient myths and in technological form it started with William Gibson’s Neuromancer. You connect your brain to the net and instantly you can meet anyone, visit anyplace and control any device if they also have a virtual dimension. This powerful idea required a face.
Slide 3
Our life has spread into many dimensions. Everyday you notice discussions where only half of the story exists in your world. We can also monitor our devices remotely and our devices can interact with each other. Nokias experimental RFID phone allows you to read electronic content information from sales packages and other stuff in stores or museums. It is like having X-ray glasses. You just point any device close to you with our mobile phone and it obeys you. Remote things require more sophistication. If you point and click any door in virtual Helsinki, you are connected to the closest landline telephone and you are using my patent.
Virtual Helsinki has never been officially opened. About 20 square kilometres of Helsinki were modelled and the province of Kainuu, which is just the size of Slovenia. However in 2000 mobile phones were not yet ready for 3D applications, GPRS was not ready to supply coordinates of moving vehicles and Helsinki Telephone sold its telephone catalogue business away because the regulator requested that it should be separated. This part of the project waits for some other investor.
Main reason why I returned to Helsinki Telephone in 1995 after 15 years of entrepreneurship was broadband. I wanted to get all of my hometown connected to broadband as quickly and efficiently as possible. I started talking about 100.000 simultaneous home broadband users and I was opposed by department chiefs who had few hundred customers with their dear business broadband products. They did not want cannibals destroying their own cream skimming.
Slide 4
I jump to one of the derivatives of the Virtual Helsinki or Helsinki Arena 2000 –project. It is called COBA, Connected Open Building Automation. We experimented with quite many technologies when building our family residence. It soon became apparent that we were living inside a huge computer with several hundred processors, sensors and actuators. But this computer did not have a robust operating system with application programming interface, device driver interface or support tools. It was way more complicated to set up than Linux or Windows. Automated full scale service provisioning was totally impossible.
With a new project consortium we defined this missing operating system. With COBA it is possible to mass tailor smart homes and connect them to service centres. These centres route requests and allocate access rights to authorised contractors. Maintenance people and security get notified if equipment malfunctions, sensors pinpoint cause for alarm or user requests any kind of assistance. Users can naturally monitor and control all living conditions locally and remotely. Homes are connected to service centres with broadband. Mobile phones act as remote monitors, assembly guides, work flow directors and diaries for mobile workforce. Distribution of this concept has started jointly with Lonix, Securitas Systems and others.
Slide 5
Let us take another angle. In 1776 Adam Smith published his “Wealth of Nations”. He analysed the foundation for market economy. Added value comes from increasing specialization and exchange. An invisible hand optimizes market transactions through competition. Resources flow to wherever they are most productive.
This theory has its merits and even though telecom operators themselves are huge hierarchies, they facilitate all sorts of self organizing phenomena through peer to peer exchange of ideas, collaboration and transactions.
It is very tempting to think hierarchically. During the nineties operators thought they could become media suppliers for the masses. Today nobody makes money from video on demand but every school kid can load any pirated movie from the net. It is natural to insist on more gatekeepers to hand money over to those whom it really belongs to. But this thinking misses the point.
Peer to peer communication is what operator business used to be. Naturally every kind of communication requires structure and there are different roles for different actors. We are not all equal. But Internet has shown the power of open self organizing communication to produce added value. Spam and viruses have also shown that open should not mean the same as opaque. Open should be transparent. We need to see who is not playing positive sum games.
Structured open interaction requires facilitated platforms. Virtual Helsinki was one such attempt and it’s time will still come. It is so much easier to travel both in the physical and virtual reality when you can see where you are going. COBA is another. Common to both of these platforms is that they allow others to come and contribute, but they also require specific service operators just like the internet requires ISP’s.
Google has shown us the immense added value that we the users can provide to each other. Google facilitates a service where we supply the valuable information, which Google arranges using the preferences we have supplied through linking.
Think about an anthill. Ants have no bosses. Their organization learns and self organizes to gain optimal benefit from their environment. Not one single ant ever learns and they think with few simple rules. However an anthill learns quickly and reacts faster and more coordinated than any of our organizations.
We have bosses and hierarchies and secrets. Some organizations are more stupid than any of their employees. Only few organizations are better than their best executives. Just think about an anthill if it was organized similarly. Limiting the anthill to what the brainiest ant can understand. Luckily the world still resembles an anthill more than a well structured and well understood organization.
Services can promote hierarchical behaviour or networked specialization. We should understand that basically telecom is not about mass media. It is about virtual reality where people can gain special expertise and collaborate with others in a self organizing way. Peer to peer is not a bad word, but it requires structures, protocols and roles to allow for greater added value. Whoever facilitates these services gets rewards like Google. It may be a company, it may be a city, but it is not synchronous.
Slide 6
Mayor Ma from Taipei studied our projects few years ago. He found a solution to their major problem. He started promoting Taipei as a digital city to lessen traffic and increase telecom usage. Even her mother started using city services through internet.
In another digital city, Kyoto, I met the father of digital city concept, Dean Bill Mitchell. He wrote the foundation to digital cities in “City of Bits”. Mitchell describes in his book how technology affects the whole behaviour pattern of inhabitants and causes manifold changes in the whole urban topology.
The famous sociologist Manuell Castells points out a clear problem. He divides people into two categories. Others live in a space of places – they get their information from pubs and clubs, village well or the racetrack. Some people live in a space of flows. The feel at home whenever they are connected to internet, GSM and CNN. This means that you may have nothing in common with your neighbour.
What we aimed to do in our projects was to create bridges. If virtual reality and physical reality are connected and people have a shared identity, both groups will come closer to each other. There are several research studies supporting this idea that local content and interaction should be favoured in virtual reality.
Slide 7
But in case we are here in order to make better business and not politics, I must show how this local focus makes sense economically.
If you think about broadband networks they tend to have bottlenecks just as voice networks used to. This is if you really encourage people to use more and more bandwidth. And you might if you sell it. The greatest bottleneck is when you connect your local broadband island to the internet. The router is actually a computer. They tend to be moderately priced only in their natural sizes. If you wish to have a ten times faster router, it may cost hundred times more. And due to IP-routing technology it is very difficult to solve this problem by using ten routers as one gateway.
Broadband operators should encourage maximum communication within their own customer base. We do pay more to be seen than to see others as TV-companies have realized. We also add value to each other if everybody does not watch the same broadcast. A good operator might achieve near local monopoly if it supplied an efficient and open multicast so that every local user could send multicast programs to each other. This polarization comes because massive peer to peer communication or even peer to peer multicast across operator boarders is not economically feasible.
I know that landline is necessary. Bits are much faster when contained. Even mobile phones need landline for the next miles. I also know that landline needs to be taken care of. I do not have similar conviction on centralized mobile networks. They exist only if they continue to evolve in useful ways. If not, they might be replaced by self organizing users. Think every 4^th^ generation mobile IP-phone was a base station to others, every broadband connection being a network sink to voice over IP calls.
I know that for historical reasons in countries other than Finland the landline is often a monopoly and technologies instead of companies compete with each other. This is not very clever as we are talking about technologies that should merge and applications that require seamless co-operation between different technologies. Regulators have a huge task in creating a level and competitive playing field where companies compete and technologies are selected for technological merits.
Slide 8 I am naturally dreaming. Many thanks for your attention.