¿Questions?

Transcript

[slide551] So, any questions? Yes? [student asks: Are we going to have another session, so we consulted first?] No, if you want to ask something, send me an email. I'll be happy to answer your questions. If we need to meet, we'll do that. If not, it's much easier to be asynchronous. [student asks: When are the presentations scheduled? Have you already scheduled it?] No. I said I'll schedule them individually roughly around week 34. But since it will be scheduled for your individual group, when you're ready to present, don't worry about it. Yes? [student asks: About the group formation, it says about something end of September. Is it true or is it...] Yes, by the end of September, you, at the latest, should tell me what your group's going to work on, and you should give me the description about what it is you're going to do. It means you can do it before then. [student asks: Yeah, of course. Is it like a draft with a problem and...] Yes, it should be a real research plan. [student responds: OK.] [student asks: It's like a research methodology course for the time.] Yes. [Student asks: Have you prepared any drafts for this or...] No, but you can take the template that you used for II2202 for the research plan for it. That's perfectly fine. Right, because you're all supposed to have had that course. [Student asks: And do you have any projects, topics or something?] I've been giving hints all along here for things to look at. [student asks: It's quite clear, but I was just thinking if you have some specific...] I think it really would be something that I'm interested in, you should pick something you're interested in. [student responds: OK.] Right, I've talked about a lot of things that I was interested in. I mean, for me, perhaps the single biggest killer thing that's waiting to be done is this issue about personal CODECs. A really cool thing, for instance, would be to couple in a VoIP system into Microsoft's translation system so that you could have real-time translation of speech into one of your choice of 60 languages. That could be really cool. And they have an API. Any other questions? Yes? [student asks: Yeah, it seems like it's very interesting. I mean, VoIP is everywhere now, like Facebook, Skype, and so on. And it seems like there is huge research in the past, like, 20 years in VoIP. But I'm just trying to understand why we still cannot communicate with the people who are using VoIP. I'm trying to understand why we still cannot communicate. We have, like, small silos, islands of applications that don't communicate with each other. So, pretty much, we have broken our communication. I mean, I understand that maybe it's like the first generation, maybe the future will be big. But I'm actually worried about it.] Well, I think what you're saying is the fact that different people made different choices in what they wanted to do. And they went for market. They went for their own particular markets. Including even the people who built open-source systems, who also made their own choices, often incompatible with other people who basically started with the same protocols. And then there were fights, we saw, between the open... the SER community and Kamilo and others. It's a very hard process. But that's what you expect as a technology goes from research into more widespread use. What happens then, usually, is some losers go away, some winners continue on, and they grow more. And eventually, some of them dominate the market. [student asks: Okay, but in all telephony, I mean, by law you have the ability to actually port your number to another...] Only for mobile phones. [Student asks: Yeah.] So in most countries, you had no mobility whatsoever for fixed phones. You could only move a mobile number. And the whole reason for doing that was to stimulate the mobile market, because otherwise the lock-in was so powerful that it was very hard to grow the number of mobile users and mobile companies. But we're starting to see the same thing happen on the fixed side. That's why we see PTS in Sweden saying, hey, within 10 years we're not even going to have city codes anymore. It doesn't make sense. So it's pretty obvious that when most of the users, and I forget what the number is now, 80% or something like that, have already gone over to voice-over IP for fixed telephony, number portability sort of falls out. But I would say, from a personal point of view, one of the difficulties I find is that today most of these operators think nationally. I have a VoIP service, and it's in this particular country. You're one of my customers, you go somewhere else, I'm sorry, but you can't take your phone number with you, so we can't take it and use it in another country. We can't necessarily even give you the same services, but you're connected to the same internet. Why not? And the first two companies we've seen move out of that mode of thinking, are Vodafone, which started thinking about all of Europe as if it was one country, and Google, with their Google Fi service, saying, hey, we'll give you a number, and it's a North American number, probably a Canadian number, and you can use it anywhere you want, because the important thing is you're our customer, and we want to keep you as our customer. So I think one of the things we're moving towards is seeing even national numbering having little meaning. But, for example, as my wife has one of these Google phones, there are services that she can't use in Sweden, because they'll only accept a +46 phone number. Even though she's directly reachable, even though the gateways work, even though it will deliver the phone call to her handset, the systems were never adopted to say, oh, yes, it's perfectly okay to have a non-plus 46 number and deliver calls to it. It's not going to cost us more money. So there's a lot of inertia in systems changing to adapt to what the technology provides. And there are also a lot of people there trying to stop it, because there are embedded interests where they don't want this to go away. They want to keep control of it. And interestingly enough, one of those entities is the tax authorities. Why? Because they make tax revenues on, yes, phone calls and phone service. Why do they do that? Well, in North America, in the U.S., for instance, there's a tax that was enacted to pay for the Civil War. It ended in the 19th century. The tax was never removed. Why? Because nowadays almost everyone has a phone, so everyone is paying this tax, and no one is looking and saying, why am I paying this tax? We paid that off long ago, and that's a great way of collecting money by the government. It's hard to make taxes go away. So one of the barriers today, for instance, to prepaid mobile service is taxes. Because the European model says it's taxed at source. So if I take my cell phone and I go to France and I make a call, who should be getting the taxes associated with that call? Well, the French government would say, it should be us, of course. Because you're here. Except that my operator might be in Zimbabwe. And my service is being provided there, and under a different model, that's where the taxes would be applied. So it becomes very hard. You have these very embedded interests for whom they have these rules, they want to keep applying them, but how do we make that work when the technology has gone a different way? So one of the hardest things, I think, that's impeded adoption in many cases has actually been the lack of legislation. Which may sound odd coming from someone in technology. But the problem is the lack of legislation means there's no clarity of what the rules are. So many people are very hesitant to do something because they don't know how the rules might turn out. So of course, time to run for the Riksdag, right? Have technology people say, okay, here are some things we should be doing because we can do it from a technical point of view and it would be good for society if we would make these sort of decisions instead of making those. That's sort of where we are in the transition. But a lot of it has happened even without anyone knowing. Or actually having rules that deal with the problems that are going to occur. Any other questions? You're all clear on what you need to do. Except you have to do twice as much (as a graduate student taking a course). Yes, the expectations are different. I expect much more from someone who's a doctoral student, a third cycle student than for a second cycle student. Yes. So you should expect to, of course, easily do more. If no questions, thank you very much. Have fun.