One of the fundamental tenets of the communication industry is that you need 100% compatibility between devices and services if you want to communicate. This was clearly understood when the Public Switched Telephone Network (PSTN) was dominated by local monopolies in the form of incumbent telcos. Together with the ITU, they put considerable effort into standardising all the commercial and technical aspects of running a national telco.
For example, the commercial settlement standards enabled telcos to share the revenue from each and every call that made use of their fixed or wireless infrastructure no matter whether the call originated, terminated or transited their geography. Technical standards included everything from compression through to transmission standards such as Synchronous Digital Hierarchy (SDH) and the basis of European mobile telephony, GSM. The IETF’s standardisation of the Internet has brought a vast portion of the world’s population on line and transformed our personal and business lives.
However, standardisation in this new century is now often driven as much by commercial businesses and consortiums which often leads to competing solutions and standards slugging it out in the market place. I guess this is as it should be if you believe in free trade and enterprise. But, as mere individuals in this world of giants, these issues can cause us real pain.
In particular, the current plethora of what we term ‘islands of isolation’ means that we often unable to communicate in ways that we wish to. In the ideal world, as exemplified by the PSTN, you are able to talk to every person in the world that owns a phone as long as you know their number. Whereas, with many new media communications services we choose to use to interact with friends and colleagues are in effect closed communities that are unable to connect.
What are the causes these so-called islands of isolation? Here are a few examples.
Communities: There are many Internet communities including free PC-to-PC VoIP services, instant messaging services, social or business networking services or even virtual worlds. Most of these focus on building up their own isolated communities. Of course, if one achieves global domination, then that becomes the de facto standard by default. That is the objective of every Internet social network start-up!
Enterprise software: Most purveyors of proprietary enterprise software thrive on developing products that are incompatible. Lotus Notes and Outlook email systems was but one example. This is often still the case today when vendors bolt advanced features onto the basic product that are not available to anyone not using that software - ‘presence’ springs to mind. This creates vendor communities of users.
Private networks: Most enterprises are rightly concerned about security and build strong protective firewalls around their employees to protect themselves from malicious activities. This means that employees of that company have full access to their own services but these are not available to anyone outside of the firewall for use on an inter-company basis. Combine this with the deployment of vendor specific enterprise software described about and you create lots of isolated enterprise communities!
Fixed network operators: It’s a very competitive world out there and telcos just love offering ‘value-added’ features and services that are only offered to their customer base. Free proprietary PC-PC calls come to mind and more recently, video telephones.
Mobile operators: A classic example with wireless operators was the unwillingness to provide open Internet access and only provide what was euphemistically called ‘walled garden’ services – which are effectively closed communities.
Service incompatibilities: A perfect example of this was MMS, the supposed upgrade to SMS. Although there was a multitude of issues behind the failure of MMS, the inability to send an MMS to a friend who used another mobile network was one of the principle ones. Although this was belatedly corrected, it came too late to help.
Equipment vendors: Whenever a standards body defines a basic standard,
equipment vendors nearly always ‘enhanced’ the standard feature set with ‘rich’ extensions. Of course, anyone using an extension could not work with someone who was not! The word ‘rich’ covers a multiplicity of sins.
Privacy: This is seen as such an important issue these days that many companies will not provide phone numbers or even email addresses to a caller. If you don’t know who you want, they won’t tell you! A perfect definition of a closed community!
One take away from this is that in the real world you can’t avoid this and all of us use several services to interact with colleagues that are effectively islands of isolation.
Your friends, family and work colleagues, by their own choice, geography and lifestyle, probably use a completely different set to yourself. You may use MSN, while colleagues use AOL or Yahoo Messenger. You may choose Skype but another colleague may use BT Softphone.
There are attempts at partially solving these issues as can be seen in the IM world, but overall this remains a major conundrum that limits our ability to communicate any time, any place and any where.
By design, trymehere is completely independent of any individual service, platform or community.
