Tag: Telecommunications

A soonologist’s view of the future

BT Futurologist Nicola Millard on being a futurologist and the future of the workplace, the open plan office and customer service.

“I think my job title is a little bit misleading,” says Nicola Millard of her role as BT’s Customer Service Futurologist. “Most people would imagine futurologists have a crystal ball that works and maybe talking about twenty to twenty five years out about a future where intelligent robots have taken over the world.”

“My horizon tends to be a bit shorter,” Nicola explains. “My time tends to start in about three weeks time and tends to extend to five years, so I’m more of an industrial futurologist and CEOs tend not think beyond the next three weeks.” “I guess more of a ‘soonologist’ than a futurologist.”

Nicola was talking to the Decoding The New Economy YouTube channel at BT’s London Demonstration centre where the time frame is somewhat more than the next three weeks as the company shows off the technology and product lines it believes are going to change the communication industry.

For BT and Nicola, much of the near future is focused in how consumer and workplace behaviour is being changed by IT and communications technology.

Nicola sees an interesting relationship between technology and people – technology can radically change peoples’ behaviour but it also can amplify existing behaviours. “It can certainly influence the way we work, rest and play, in the ways we approach the office and how we consume,” says Nicola.

“Behaviour changes are really fascinating when we give people people access to technologies that give them more choice and more information than ever before. It untethers us. All of these thing present opportunities to change that way we do stuff.”

The untethered office

Technology has also untethered the office, says Nicola. “In the old days we had to go to the office at nine o’clock in the morning and leave at five in the afternoon. We didn’t have any other options – we had a desk, we had big technology and we had masses of paper.”

“That’s all changed.” Workplaces have always struggled with collaboration and Nicola sees the open plan office as being a 1970s attempt to get workers to talk and work with each other rather than hiding behind closed doors. “By forcing people into open plan we hoped that by breathing the same air they would start to collaborate.”

“Now we collaborate with people that aren’t necessarily in the same place as us. The office itself has become a collaboration tool,” Nicola says. “We’re seeing the evolution of the office.”

Today’s technology tools and remote working have changed the role of the workplace with the office becoming a place for workers to collaborate and work together, however that nature of work has changed.

Working beyond the office

With improved connectivity the home office and mobile workers have come into their own with BT having around ten percent of their workforce operating from their residences and the company finds they achieve around a twenty percent improvement in productivity from those staff.

However home working isn’t for everyone. “I’m a terrible home worker,” Nicola says. “I tend to go mad so if I want to collaborate I go to the office but I want to work quietly I go to the coffice’, which is generally a third place outside the office or home.”

“There’s only four things I need to work; good coffee, good cake – these first two are non-negotiable –  good connectivity and then I need company. Not necessary office type company but just a buzz.“

The change to retailing

Today’s buzz extends to shopping, the shops are fuller on a Saturday afternoon than they have ever been before. The showrooming phenomenon – where customers use their smartphones to check prices and proudcts while in the shop – allows retailers to enhance their sales strategy as the same available to shoppers can also be used by sales assistants.

“Shopping is sometimes a contact sport,” Nicola observes. “the fact we are comparing and contrasting, the fact we are challenging the physical shop. Waving our mobile phone on the shopfloor.” “Retailers for a long time resisted showrooming, they split their online and physical spaces. We’re now seeing those physical lines blurring.”

Emerging trends

Nicola sees the biggest challenge facing business in the near future being agility – as cloud services expand, it’s easier for companies to scale which places pressure on many incumbent businesses.

Big Data also presents opportunities, “there’s always been big data, we’ve always had too much data, the analytics tools have changed.” For great challenge though for business is change and this is what will focus executive attention in the near future. “Businesses tend to be built to last rather than for change.”

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Can mobile networks build Myanmar’s economy?

Myanmar, or Burma, is emerging from being a backward economy, can mobile networks help the nation’s economic development?

Fifty years ago Myanmar, or Burma, was one of Asia’s most affluent nations, but a succession of poor governments have seen the country become one of the world’s poorest. Can mobile phone networks be part of Myanmar’s econmic recovery?

The potential economic impact of mobile communications in Myanmar is a report prepared by Deloitte Consulting for network equipment vendor Ericsson claiming that rolling out cellphone networks across the nation will create 90,000 jobs in the emerging economy.

Myanmar is starting from a low base with only 2% mobile penetration rates, compared to over 40% in Timor-Leste and Laos while the average across South-East Asia is over 100%.

Myanmar lags south east asia mobile penetration rates

To address this the Myanmar Post and Telecommunications Department is looking a splitting the existing phone monopoly into three or possibly four licenses.

Ericsson’s report looks at the economic effects of rolling out these networks and some of the opportunities for local entrepreneurs and communities.

The biggest employment effect identified in the Ericsson/Deloitte report is through the reseller networks with 50,000 of the 90,000 jobs created by new mobile services being in the sales channel.

What’s striking about that prediction is how it doesn’t look at the broader effects of modernising the country’s phone network. The report’s authors do mention they believe the overall benefits could boost the Burmese economy by over 9% in a best case scenario but don’t fully delve into where they believe that growth will come from.

myanmar-gdp-effects-of-mobile-networks

It can be expected there’ll be many more indirect benefits as Myanmar’s communications networks jump into the 21st Century, the report itself has a chapter citing various benefits mobile networks have delivered to countries as diverse as Kenya, Chile and Bhutan.

Particularly interesting with Myanmar’s development will be the Chinese influence in rolling out these networks – the PRC is already the biggest foreign investor in the country having largely ignored western sanctions on the military regime and it can be expected players like Huawei and China Mobile will be well positioned in bidding for licenses and contracts.

For local entrepreneurs the complex Burmese language is a natural opportunity for app developers and programmers to develop localised versions of successful applications, the lack of English and Chinese language skills among the population – another terrible neglect by successive governments – will hamstring Myanmar’s digital media export opportunities.

Probably the biggest risk to Myanmar’s success though is the role of the military who are expected to get one of those mobile licenses.

Burma’s terrible economic performance over the last fifty years has been largely due to the incompetence, greed and corruption of various military rulers and, while their continued influence in the nation’s economy may be necessary to placate them and their cronies, the legacy of these people may act as a break on a really open economy or fair markets.

For Myanmar, the opening of cell phone networks is great opportunity. Hopefully the vested interests that have held this nation back for so long will resist the temptation to further damage the country’s prospects.

Burmese landscape image by ZaNuDa through sxc.hu.

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What would you do if the computer screen went dark?

Warrnambool’s phone problems remind businesses of the importance of continuity planning

What would you do if the computer went dark? originally appeared in Smart Company on November 29, 2012.

One of the truisms of business is the more ways customers can pay; the more likely you are to make the sale.

This is particularly true when something goes wrong – the customer hasn’t any cash, the till is jammed or the EFTPOS system is down.

Exactly this happened to thousands of businesses across south-west Victoria last week when a fire burned down the Warrnambool telephone exchange.

Unfortunately for the people and businesses of the surrounding region, much of the telephone, internet and Telstra’s mobile network runs through the burned out telephone exchange, sending the district back into the pre-telephone days.

This presented real problems as customers couldn’t use EFTPOS or get cash out of ATMs, while businesses struggled to get payrolls done or place orders with suppliers who couldn’t comprehend that it wasn’t possible to place orders over the net or by fax.

A hundred kilometres north of Warrnambool in the Grampians town of Dunkeld, a cafe worker told the ABC, “suppliers say ‘send a fax’ and you’re like ‘we can’t’ and they’re like ‘oh, we don’t want to handwrite it’.”

Those suppliers are a good example of not having the systems or staff in place to deal with ‘out of the box’ situations.

Unexpected events like the phone network being down for a week, major floods, devastating bushfires or zombie invasions will test businesses and it’s why having a real Business Continuity Plan (BCP) is important for business.

A workable BCP is one that identifies all the critical failure points for the business such as not having the internet for a week, a flooded office or, as happened to one of my clients, their entire building collapsing into the construction site next door.

The various state business agencies have guides on what to consider in a Business Continuity Plan including a good one from the South Australian government.

Regardless of how comprehensive a plan your business has, the most important part is going to be your people. If your organisation is staffed or managed by people who like to say “computer says no,” then they are going to be particularly useless when the computer is stone dead.

As the Warrnambool outage shows, unexpected business disruptions can come from anywhere, so flexible thinking and initiative is what matters in a crisis. It’s something worth thinking about with your staff and systems.

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How do communications networks stand up to real times of disruption?

We often say modern communications are disrupting society – but what happens when they themselves are disrupted?

One of the big problems during and after Hurricane Sandy was how the cell phone network fell over.

As the Wall Street Journal describes, many parts of New York and New Jersey still didn’t have mobile phone services several days after the storm.

Yang Yeng, a shopkeeper selling batteries, candles, and flashlights on the street in front of his still darkened shop in the East Village, said his T-Mobile phone was useless in the area. The situation, he said, reminded him of the occasional cellphone-service outages where he used to live, on the outskirts of a small city in southern China.

What’s often overlooked is that mobile networks are different products from a different era to the traditional landlines most of us grew up with.

The older landline phone systems used their own power and the batteries in most telephone exchanges had enough juice to supply the Plain Old Telephone Service (POTS). So in the event of a blackout most services kept running.

Of course POTS services could still be disrupted – a car could hit a pole on your street, those poles could burn down in a fire, your local exchange could be struck by lighting or a blackout could last longer than the telephone company’s batteries.

Most importantly, in times of major emergencies those exchanges would get overwhelmed by frantic callers trying to contact the authorities or their families.

All of the above would have happened during Hurricane Sandy, so it is somewhat unfair to single out the mobile networks for their ‘unreliability’.

There are some differences though with modern mobile and fibre based networks that shouldn’t be overlooked when understanding the reliability of these systems in times of crisis or disaster.

A hunger for power

Modern communications networks need far more power than the POTS network. Fiber repeaters, cell towers and the handsets themselves can’t be sustained in the way low powered rotary phones and mechanical telephone exchanges were.

The cost of providing and maintaining reliable batteries to these devices is a serious item for telcos and it’s no surprise they lobbied against laws mandating the use of them in cell phone towers.

Even if they were installed, the fibre connections to the towers are also subject to the same problem of needing power to connect them to the rest of the network.

Of course the problem of keeping power to your handset then kicks in. Many smartphones or cordless landline handsets struggle to keep a charge for 24 hours, further reducing their effectiveness during any outage that lasts more than a day.

Bandwidth Blues

Even if your cellphone does keep its charge and the local tower remains running and connected to the backbone, there’s no guarantee you can get a line out.

In this respect, the modern systems suffer the same problem as the old phone networks – there’s a limit to the traffic you can stuff down the pipe.

This isn’t news if you’ve tried to make a call on your mobile at half time at a sporting event or at the end of a big concert. If there’s too much traffic, then the system starts rationing bandwidth; some people get a line out while others don’t.

Prioritising traffic

Another way of managing demand during high traffic times is to ‘prioritize’ what passes over the network – voice comes first, SMS second and data a distant last.

This is why on New Year’s Eve you might be able to call your mum, but you can’t post a Facebook update from your smartphone and all your text messages come through at 5am the following morning.

During emergencies it’s fair to assume that if the mobile network stays up, social networks won’t be the priority of the operators and this is something not understood by those advocating reliance of social networks during disasters.

No best efforts

Probably most important to understand is the difference between the utility culture of the POTS operators and the ‘best effort’ services offered by ISPs and many mobile phone companies.

Under the ‘utility model’, the telco was run the same way as the power company and water board – largely run by Engineers with a focus on ensuring the network stays up for 99.99% of the time.

That four or ‘five nines’ reliability is expensive and the step between each decimal point means an exponential increase in costs and spare capacity.

Over the last three decades the utilities themselves have seen a reduction of reliability as the costs of maintaining a network that has a 24 hour outage once every three years (99.9%)* over three times a year (99%) interfere with a company’s ability to pay management bonuses.

ISPs and most cell phone networks never really had this problem as their services are based upon ‘best effort’. If you read your contract, user agreement or condition of sale you’ll find the provider doesn’t really guarantee anything except to do their best in getting you a service – if they fail, tough luck.

As we become more connected, we have to understand the limitations of our communications networks. The assumptions those systems will be around when we need them could bring us unstuck.

*the definition of uptime and what constitutes an outage varies, the definition I’ve used is a 24 hour blackout or suspension of supply in any given area.

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