SMS is nearly "free" for telecom carriers
The protocol is called "SS7" (Signaling System 7). Like most teleco protocols it is difficult to parse and ill-defined. This is how telcos keep new competition from starting. They hype SS7 as something so complicated that only rocket scientists could ever understand it. Of course, it is an ITU standard, so it isn't a secret how it works. You just have to pay a lot of money to get a copy of the standard. In fact, once Cisco had a working SS7 software stack the downfall of Lucent/AT&T/others was only years away. Heck, Cisco published a book demystifying SS7. It turns out the emperor had no clothes and Cisco wanted everyone to know. SS7 is big and scary, but only as bad as most protocols. I guess SMTP or SNMP would be scary too if you had never seen a protocol before. (Remember that non-audio networks are still "new" to the telecom world, or at least their executives.)
SS7 is all about setting up "connections". When I dial a number, SS7 packets are sent out that query databases to translate the phone number I want to dial to a physical address to connect to, then an SS7 query goes out to request that all the phone switches from point A to point B allocate bandwidth and start letting audio through. The nomenclature dates back to what was used when phone calls were set up by ladies sitting in front of switchboards.
What makes international dialing work is that there are SS7 gateways between all the carriers. They don't charge each other for this bandwidth because it is just the cost of doing business. The logs of what calls are actually made is used to create billing records, and the carrier do charge each other for the actual calls. Thus, there is no charge for the SS7 packets between AT&T and O2 (O2 is a big cell provider in Europe), but O2 does back-bill AT&T for the phone call that was made. (This is called "Settlement" and my previous employer processed 80% of the world's settlement records on behalf of the phone companies.)
Setting up a connection for an SMS would be silly. An entire connection for just a 160-byte message? No way. That's more trouble than it is worth. Therefore, SMS is the only service where the actual service is provided over SS7. The 160-byte limit comes from a limit in SS7 packet size.
However, the phone companies don't really do anything for free. The SMS records are used to construct billing data and the companies certainly do back-bill each other for SMS carried by each other's networks. If you SMS from AT&T to O2, there is settlement going on after the fact. However, SMS between two AT&T customers has no real cost.
"Multimedia SMS" (photos) are not sent over SS7, though SS7 is used to setup/teardown the connection just like a phone call. If they were smart they'd use SS7 to just transmit an email address and then send the photo over the internet. It would probably be cheaper. (Though, when has a telco has a well-run email system? Sigh.)
So, SMS is "free" because it rides on the back of pre-existing infrastructure. The "cost" is due to the false economics created to "extract value" out of the system (i.e. "charge money").
If they were doing it all from scratch, they could probably run it all over the internet for "free" too. Heck, it wouldn't be much bandwidth even if people learned to type 100x faster.
Why was SMS permitted to use SS7 unlike any other service? The real reason, I'm told, wasn't entirely technical. It was due to the fact that the telecos thought that nobody would actually use the service. Little did they know that it would catch on among teens and then spread!
More info:
- Google for [ss7 protocol]
- Comparison of SS7 to TCP/IP
- Wikipedia article on SS7
- Cisco's SS7 book (also available on O'Reilly's Safari Books Online)
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Gmail adds "Tasks" feature
Hey time management fans! Google has announced a very simple task manager to gmail as part of their "labs" offering.To enable Tasks, go to Settings, click the Labs tab (or just click here if you're signed in). Select "Enable" next to "Tasks" and then click "Save Changes" at the bottom. Then, after Gmail refreshes, on the left under the "Contacts" link, you'll see a "Tasks" link. Just click it to get started.If you've read Time Management for System Administrators you may be wondering, "Can I use The Cycle with Google Tasks?" The answer is: sort of. You can have one todo list per day, because the system lets you create multiple lists. However, events don't float to the next day if they aren't completed "today", and in fact, moving items to the next list is rather time consuming. Instead, it is very easy to move items up and down the list. Thus, if you insert date markers, you can move things to "tomorrow" very easily. However, be careful not to accidentally create "the never-ending list of doom". Here's a screenshot of what using The Cycle might look like:
What's my favorite feature? The fact that there is now a menu item under "More Actions" that lets you turn an email into a task. The subject line is used for the task, and a link to the original message is included. I think this makes it very powerful.
In summary: The fact that the tasks aren't a function of the calendar like most systems is interesting, and will require some adjustment. The ability to easily link tasks to email threads has some interesting possibilities.
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Tom interviewed on CuddleTech blog
Ben Rockwood interviewed Tom for his blog's podcast. We talk about time management, the history and future of system administration, and a lot more. Links to the podcast are on his blog www.CuddleTech.com/blogComments (0) | TrackBack (0)
Comments working again.
Posting comments to this blog now works. It had been broken.
The problem was that the captcha protection was activated but the codes displaying them were not in the template. All fixed.
The problem had gone unnoticed because captchas weren't required for registered users (which I am one of). I've added this test-case for future server upgrades. Thanks to all that sent email about this. We wouldn't have noticed the problem without your help!
Peace, Love, and Wiki Collaboration
In Arthur C. Clarke's book "2001, A Space Oddessy" he predicts that world peace is achieved with the help of the phone company.
There is a subtle point made that international phone calls became flat rate or "free" (monthly fee, dial all you want) and that with people freely able to communicate, they do communicate; and with this people around the world understand each other better and as a result world peace breaks out around the world. World peace, thanks to free phone calls.
That hasn't happened yet. Yet.
However, with the internet we freely communicate with people around the world. Email with people around the world. Meet people in chat rooms from countries you've never heard of. Skype and IM without knowing a country-code or area code. With YouTube, we see each in real-life situations without the filter of how Hollywood, the film industry, or the government want us to see each other. With the power of wikis, blogs, and social networking sites people collaborate without borders or limits.
Imagine an entire generation growing up in such an environment. Kids are using wiki's to plan events and social networking sites to start movements. How many generations before people think of international borders as old fashioned and out-dated as rotary phones and carbon paper.
I'm starting to believe more and more that Clarke's vision of people inspired by communication is coming true.
In the late 1900s it was believed that no two capitalist countries that did trade ever went to war with each other. Trade is more valuable than war. Or as one PhD thesis put it, "Now two countries with a McDonalds have ever started a war with each other."
I think the power of free communication can achieve even more.
If you need more convincing, how could a generation that coordinates something like this ever want to go to war? How could you support a politician that wants to wage war with your friend that simultaneously danced "Thriller" with you on October 25th?
Yes, I said it. Thriller. Around the world.
(video by www.ThrillTheWorld.com)
System administration needs more PhDs
[ This is still "first draft" quality but I'm posting it rather than keeping it bottled up. Feedback appreciated.]
There are those that believe that the history of system administration will follow a similar path to electrical engineering. Broadly categorized, there are 3 types of careers in that area:
- Electricians: People that have limited scientific education, but though apprenticeships and certifications they do the majority of the work in buildings, both deployments and repairs. They "follow the building code" (the building and safety guidelines for their state or country) but couldn't write new build codes (and would never try). Inspectors are paid to check their work for conformance to the "building code". 80% of all electrical work is in this category, and it is usually thankless and boring.
- Electrical engineers: People that have university degrees and understand both the theory and practice of what they do. They specialize in specific areas (construction, circuit design, chip design, etc.). The design new products. More advanced EEs write the building codes that electricians follow.
- Researchers: People (typically with PhDs) that are advancing the science of electrical engineering. They may invent entirely new ways of doing things, rather than just new products.
The field of system administration is already following this kind of trajectory. There are people in that first category: they have Cisco, MS, and LPI (Linux) certifications, they are mostly deploying vendor-approved architectures and design patterns (known as "best practices"). When they get creative you should be as scared as you would if an electrician installing a new circuit in your house told you he "got creative"). We don't have the auditing or inspection system yet, but SOX is the closest we have.
System administration has that second category too. They usually are the senior sysadmins in a company, and often are employed by vendors to create the best practice documents and certifications used by the first category. Sadly they often have the same titles as people in the first category which creates confusion.
The third category is quite rare in system administration. How often in our lives will something be invented that radically changes the way we do IT? There are a few that I can think of: Local storage vs. remote storage NFS. Individually managed accounts on each machine to NIS (laterLDAP). Waiting for users to complain vs. monitoring for outages. Keeping machines in sync by hand vs. cfengine (later Puppet).
All of these were major changes to our industry (and I profess that 80% of the industry doesn't do most of those things yet, so there is plenty of work to do).
There are very few schools that have Masters or PhD programs in system administration. Some call it IT, and dilute it with a lot of research around what we used to call MIS. A lot of the innovation in system administration comes from industry, which is usually good, but sometimes taints the research.
I believe there are many interesting areas of research that need more effort:
- Why are good practices so rarely adopted?
- What prevents a constant number of sysadmins from administrating growing populations of machines or users?
- Why is debugging so complicated?
- How to organize teams of system administrators to maximize macro efficiency and personal efficiency?
- How to delegate to users without expecting users to be system administrators?
- What traits do successful system administration organizations share?
- Are we asking the right questions?
These are the same questions we've always asked yet the need for research grows as system administration becomes more complicated and society becomes more dependent on technology.
Maybe we need to write less code and spend more time thinking.
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Half of Canada's workforce "dragged down" by office negativity
I'm quoted in this article in ITbusiness.ca about a study that finds that younger IT employees are feel greatly distracted by office negativity:In days when people rarely changed jobs it was easier for a team to get to the high performance level. "But today. more often than not, your team always has at least one new person and is trying to get back to that high performing team mode."Most of my quotes are in page 2 and 3 of the article.
Time Management for Anarchists
Jim Munroe teaches Time Management in grassroots activism. He's turned his talk into an 8-minute Flash animation. The points he makes are excellent. Check it out.Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)
